Testing, testing, hey, can everyone hear me clearly? Right, I can see the, I can see I attend this streaming in, can you hear me, can you see me? Right, we are streaming, we're streaming from Zoom, we're streaming from YouTube, we're streaming from Facebook, right? So, okay, I can see the question, okay, cool. Can see people coming in, nice, nice, nice. Hey, Bargaff, nice to see you, right? We've got Charles, we've got George, we've got Alex, Alan, nice to see you too. Guzma, nice to see you, come back, Marfano, Amada, nice to see you all, right? When you're sending the messages, you know, you can send it to hosts and panelists and you can also send it to everyone, right? So, there's a little drop-down list where you can do. So, if you wanna chat with the other fellow attendees over here, other fellow TickMill traders, right? This would be a great way to do it. I'm not sure if, I'm pretty sure you guys should be able to send the messages through on Facebook and YouTube too. Oh yeah, cool, Ismail, I see you, right? Kogwai, right, Rashid, I see you too, right? Thank you guys for tuning in, right? Today will be a pretty fun session, right? Our focus is on part of this bigger Ultimate Forex Trading Masterclass. For now it's every fortnight, but we're gonna move towards maybe a weekly series, right? Today's session, right? If today is the third session, all of I think six or seven sessions, right? Our first one was an introduction to, actually it might be the fourth session already, right? We have an intro to Forex, we have fundamentals one-on-one, technical analysis one-on-one, right? Today we're gonna do a deep dive into support and resistance, which forms the foundation of a lot of what we used to trade. Okay, now I want to encourage you guys that I literally have another screen that is open here, watching the questions come true. So if you can, right, please, yes, do not wait until the end of the webinar to send your questions through, because then we guarantee you there will not be any time for us to answer questions. If things go as it traditionally does, we rarely have time to attend to questions, right? So let me just make sure everything's running fine. Okay, everything's running fine. We stream, everyone on YouTube can hear me, everyone on Facebook can hear me, everyone on Zoom can hear me. I can see everyone's questions. Now let's begin today's session, all right? Let's begin today's session. Okay, now of course, first and foremost, before we begin disclaimer, guys remember that everything in this webinar is educational in nature, nothing should be construed as investment or trading advice. So please do your own little due diligence before you guys trade, all right? Now, moving on, right? Your host for today, right? For those of you guys who are here for the first time, right, in fact, who is here for the first time, right? Perhaps you can do a quick raise of hands, right? So I can know if you're here for the first time, I can direct you to the correct places, right? We've got Richies here for the first time. Welcome, welcome. Guzman here for the first time, right? Nice to see you, Rashid. I'm not sure if you're here for the first time, but nice to see you guys here. I can see people raising their hands, right? Awesome, right? Okay, if you're here for the first time, you're wondering who is this person, right? Who is this person? Let me do a quick introduction about myself. Amada, is your second time? That's great, that's great. So you must have joined me like two weeks ago or something, right? So this is me, Desmond Leong, right? So I run the award-winning research from Average Fortune Group. So this is a partnership with TickMeal where we're bringing you guys the good stuff, the juicy stuff, the stuff that I take a trading to the next level, right? We are finalists for the best FX research 2019, 2020, 2021, best equity research in 2020 and 2021. You know, usually I'll provide, we work with the major financial institutions out there and we have a special partnership with TickMeal to bring you guys very high-grade education, the stuff that you don't find on Baby Pips, the stuff that you don't find on Forex Factory, nothing against them, but yeah, you know, the good stuff. All right, so we have testimonials of people who have seen their trading turn around, right? Going from 40% to 60% heat rate, 60 or 80% heat rate, unprofitable, profitable, right? It's all a case, right? If there's any word of encouragement I wanna share with you guys, you don't need to be 30 years in trading to be profitable, right? It can be like me, you know, I'm just a little bit 32, I'm 32 years old, right? But you know what, like a 30 days, right? 30 days focusing on the right things, right? Can help you turn your trading around and that's why I wanna encourage you guys, right? You don't need to go on a crazy course spending $30,000, $3,000, just to learn the right stuff, right? Over here at TickMeal, we're bringing you guys, you know, a high-grade education, right? Filter, meaning that we went through the wrong stuff so we know how to teach the right stuff, right? And we're teaching you here today, right? So I'm gonna teach things slightly differently. I have my take on support and resistance, supply and demand is slightly different from the traditional approaches and I find that I spoke pretty well in our trading strategies. So if you need to clarify, don't hesitate to ask questions right away, right? Whether on YouTube, Facebook or Zoom, all right? Now let's begin to this session. Selva that are tuning in for the first time, welcome. Okay, so today's session, what can we expect in today's session, all right? There are a couple of things that we're gonna focus on, right? Focus on traditional swing highs and swing lows, right? It sounds a little bit simple, but I'm gonna show you what constitute, what are called significant swing highs or significant swings and what constitute insignificant swings because the danger when we trade often lies when we look at the insignificant swing highs and the insignificant swing lows, we place importance where it's not important, right? And that is in trading, right? It's important to apply discretion. It's important to apply filter, you know?  You know, it's just pure candlestick charts.  Whether it's a stochastic, you know, moving averages, addigators, right? I don't know, envelopes, right? You know, every word in the dictionary, right? They just throw it there, right? They have all these different indicators and they get, you know, what you call analysis paralysis, right? You know, you have too many things you don't know how to make a proper trade from there, right? You need to find a proper balance, right? And that's all things. And that is an important lesson that we're trying to teach you guys today. You know, it's knowing when to say no to an indicator, knowing when to say no to a particular analysis and knowing when to say yes to one because the world of trading is very different, right? It's very different from the world of academia, right? The world of academia just tells you that you just need to study, study, study, and all will be well, right? Study, I've said it a couple of times, right? But you know, in the world of academia, they say that in the more you study, the higher your chances on passing the exam, the higher chance of doing well, right? And for the sake of the people who are here for the first time, it is very different when it comes to trading. The more you study does not guarantee you a better trading result. And that kind of clashes with what most people understand are the way they've been brought up, right? They've been brought up thinking that all they need to do is to study, right? Study and you do well, right? I study more about forex, I study more about trading, I'm supposed to do well, but that is not true. In forex trading, it is partially true. You need to study the right stuff, okay? Let me repeat that again. You need to study the right stuff, right? As one of my favorite sayings is that one of the worst things to do in life is to run full speed in the wrong direction, okay? So imagine you have a hundred meter race, everyone's running in the correct direction, you're running in the wrong direction. You need to U-turn, you need to make up all the distance they ran wrongly just to catch up with them. And that's a danger in trading, right? Sometimes the stuff we find on, maybe stuff we find on the different forums out there, right? We might learn it, but it might be the wrong stuff, right? We might get a false sense of confidence that, hey, I'm learning stuff here, I'm gonna be a good trader, right? I know how moving average work, I know how correlation work, I know how to use it in trading, but you're only looking at it from one person's perspective and often if you hold on to that, right? You might cause you take losses, for example. Now, for example, I wanna touch on one topic, just to illustrate this, okay? When you guys trade, how many of you guys have fixed take profits and fixed stop losses? Or how many of you guys don't have a fixed take profit or fixed stop loss? Can you guys just maybe type in the questions, question section, so I know how many of you guys are, let me make sure it's chat, yeah, chat is working. Yeah, how many of you guys use fixed take profits and how many of you guys use variable take profit and stop loss levels, right? So I can get a quick gauge, no participants, okay? All right, I notice that this is not arranged alphabetically, okay? All right, okay, I can see quite a number of answers come through, right? If some of you guys fixed stop loss, fixed stop loss, yes. Fixed take profit, not really by Ellen, right? I'm not, available stop loss, variable for goal, always set stop loss, fixed take profit, adjustable stop loss, not sure what the difference is. It's quite concerning, Jonathan, right? But don't worry, that's what you're here for. Fixed stop loss, right? Okay, so that's the thing, right? So that's one of the dangers when it comes to trading, right? So sometimes people take a trade. Let me see if I got my handy dandy little pen over here, okay? I have my handy dandy pen over here, right? So the problem with a fix, let's just say, right? You take a trade over here, okay? Let's talk about swing lows now, all right? Price as a swing low over here, there's a swing low over here, right? You can see that there's this, you know, there's one swing low as two swing lows over here, right? And you take a trade, let's just say you take a trade over here. This is the trade where you enter and you want to, it's a bullish trade, right? That is bull, you're expecting it to go up, right? And you have these swing lows apart. Would you put your stop loss over here, right? I'm gonna call it A, or will you put your stop loss over here, B? Will you put it at A, or will you put it at B? Let's see, the answers of you guys right now, quite a number of you guys say B, we got Kelvin who is saying A, right? Got B, Amada saying A, we got Felix, B, B, B, B. All right, the majority of you guys are saying B, right? And the concept of that, right? You can merely grasp the concept that, you know, it's good to put your stop loss slightly beyond to give it that bit of breathing space. Now, the problem is that you look at this, you have a preference, you have a preference for your stop loss, right? The distance from here, from your entry to your stop loss, right? Might be 110 pips, right? It could be 110 pips over here. But if you follow some kind of trading strategy online, you know, this master guru or something says that, hey, whenever you enter a trade, remember put a stop loss of 100 pips, right? Maybe 100 pips might have you putting the stop loss at A instead, right? Over here, A is 100, B is 110. Now you got a problem, right? You are putting your stop loss at an unoptimal spot because of the strategy you're using that requires you to have a fixed stop loss or a fixed take profit, right? What I'm trying to drive at here is that in trading, it's important to look at what the market is telling you, right? If the market tells you that there are two major swing low levels here and price is unlikely to come down even if price comes down here, it's likely to bounce up, right? It means that it's better for you to put your stop loss slightly beyond. Give yourself that little bit of breathing space, okay? And that can only be done if you use a variable stop loss, meaning that you look at what the market is telling you before you put your stop loss, you look at what the market is telling you before you put a take profit, right? And that is how you avoid, you know, in cases where you always get stopped out and then the market starts going up in the direction where you originally intended it to do, right? That is a case of, it's not that your strategy is bad, right? But instead is more of your stop loss placement. You need to optimize your stop loss placement. So when it comes to trading, right? When you're looking at swing lows or swing highs, stop loss, remember, I'm gonna give you a little bit of a cheat sheet over here, right? Stop loss beyond, okay? Try to put it beyond the key level, okay? And take profit, you can try to put it before a key level, okay? Yeah, variable is better, more analysis. I'm glad you understand it now, Jonathan, right? And yeah, so that's the important thing when, you know, when it comes to this kind of webinars, right? You just, if anytime you have a question, right?  And I can share, my insights on why, you know, you should have fixed stop loss, fixed take profit, variable stop loss, variable take profit. But now without further ado, let's start diving a little bit into swing highs and swing lows, okay? Okay, swing highs and swing lows. Let's see, have it here, okay? Now, swing highs and swing lows need to be this thing called significant. I'm gonna highlight this word here, significant, right? Because many times in trading, right, we tend to look at things that are not so significant. And if they're not significant, they're not gonna be effective. So in this example, right, I'm showing you that prices, right? When you're looking at a chart, right? These movements are very significant. Now, you would better understand this when I show you the contrast on what is insignificant. What's the insignificant swing high and swing low, all right? So this of course, this is the wrong way, right? Look at this, every single level here is a swing, you know, it's a swing high and swing low. So it's not very effective when it comes to trading. So the danger of this is that when people sometimes look at swing highs and swing lows, they get too caught up. They place too big of a significance.    And often in trading, the money is made not by the money is made, not only getting in the right trades, but it's also by avoiding the bad trades, right? So how you avoid the bad trades is by filtering out, in this case, for example, in significant swing highs and in significant swing lows. Okay? Now, what are the, now what is the, what are significant swings? This is an example of significant swings, right?  When nice big low, nice big highs and these are big levels that the market are respecting, right? Anyone universally who looks at this level knows that price came up to here touches level and it really, really retraced. So, so got free. It's actually asking a pretty good question. Is the chart daily, right? So what he means is this, is it referring to the D1 chart? Is he referring to the H4 chart? Is it referring to the H1 chart? You know, is it maybe referring to the M5 chart? Now, how to better explain this is that the timeframe doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether it's a daily timeframe. It doesn't matter whether it's the H4, H1 timeframe. And that's why I've prepared charts to kind of give you a better, yes, bar graph, that's a really, really great answer, right? Pattern matter, not so much timeframe. So let's, let's, let's throw up this chart on the dollar index here. Okay, let's throw up this chart on the dollar index. Now, let's just say, right, we're looking over here and we're thinking, man, you know, this is not that great. You know, this is not, these are small little levels. Okay, they're not all that great. Correct, we're looking at it and maybe besides this little swing higher at the top, you know, the rest of them are just, you know, not that impressive. However, this is on the H4 chart. What looks insignificant on the four-hour timeframe, if you move to the one-hour timeframe, suddenly these levels, these things that I was drawing previously, whoa, they look a lot more significant, right? This bounce, this reversal, this reversal from the top, this bounce from here, right? This movement from here, this movement, suddenly they look a lot more significant, right? So what doesn't look significant on the, on the one-day timeframe, might look significant on the four-hour timeframe. That's where you can actually jump in. There's a sort of multi-time frame kind of analysis, which I will touch on a little bit later, right? So then back to the question, okay, something is not significant on the four-hour timeframe, but significant on the one-hour timeframe, do we use it to trade or do we not use it to trade? Okay, now the answer to this question depends on your trading horizon and your trading strategy. What that means is that if you're trading strategy, okay, let's have a little bit of a Q&A session over here. If you were a day trader, all right, if you were a day trader and it trades you whole, often do not last longer than a day, right? Meaning that you try to close the trade off by the end of the day, right? What is the timeframe you should be using? What timeframe do you use? Okay, right, a couple of answers, all answers are pouring in, right? Okay, we got M1 timeframe, right? By Fernandez, whoa, okay, that's intense, man. I'm not sure if you're meeting the one-minute timeframe or the one-month timeframe. M1 timeframe, four-hour, 15-minute, one-hour, four-hour, D1 timeframe, one-day timeframe, or the H4 timeframe, but I'm not done, all right? One, two, three, D1, no longer the H4, H1, H4, okay. Most of the answers are in the H1 timeframe, H4 timeframe, and some in the one-minute time frames, right? Some, I think one person reference the daily time frames. Now, guys, okay, the next key question which I'm gonna ask you, if you were, right, I would clockwise say this is the H1 and M30 timeframe, okay? Now, if you were a position trader, meaning that trades you help are usually helped for about one week to one month, right? A couple of months. What timeframe do you use to trade? Right, we got Charles answering the D1 timeframe, we got Alex and Christian saying it's the daily timeframe, right, minimum H4 and higher day, week one month, right? By Martial, right, week one, one-day, one-week, H4 plus, right, I can see the answers pouring in, right? And you notice that a lot of the answers are very different, right, are very different from the first question I answered. I first, the first question I asked, right? So depending on your time horizon, you will change the time sensitivity of your trade. And that is how you determine significance of swing high, swing low, significance of chart patterns, right? If you were looking at the H1, if you were a day trader, then you, this would be the, this would be the swing highs and swing lows that you are focusing on because you are a day trader, right, the trades that you hold on to, usually last within the day, the best time frames you can use for, I tend to gravitate towards the H1, right? And maybe the H4 chart, why H4 chart might not be universally applicable for daily, for day traders is because depending on the markets that you trade, some markets are only active for about eight hours, right? And not so active for the rest, right? Depending on the CFD that you trade, right? But otherwise, yeah, you can see Kelvin sums it up pretty well, right? Daily, weekly and monthly sometimes H4 for the longer-term time frames, right?  So I know it's a long answer to a short question but I think it's a very important learning point which I wanted to expand on is that when you ask what time frame, whenever someone is teaching something and you think like, oh man, what time frame is that? Remember, the time frame does not matter, right? The pattern, the approach matters, right? And the time frame only matters depending on the strategy that you're using. Are you a scalper? It's kind of look at the five-minute, 15-minute at most one-hour charts. Are you a day trader, H1, H4? Maybe you reference the daily charts for the key levels, right? Are you a swing trader? Are you a position trader? Because depending on that, then you adjust the sensitivity of your analysis, okay? Now, the next thing that we're gonna touch on, right? Next thing that we're gonna touch on, gonna bring us back to this chart over here, right? Multiple swing highs and multiple swing lows, all right? Single swings here, right, they are not very strong. They are, you can highlight good resistance and good support, but they are not necessarily very strong. Now, over here, these are multiple swings, okay? And they tend to be stronger. I'm gonna ask you guys a question. You guys can answer it while I go and try to grab some water because I'm very thirsty. All right, I forgot to get water for myself, right? How many swing highs, right? Should you combine ideally, minimally, for swing high resistance to be considered strong? Is it two, three, four, five?  Okay, I like, I see a lot of answers, say two. Some of you guys say two or three max, more than that zone starts to weaken. Well, I like the reference to the zone, right? It's a very smart answer, right? Hamid says three million, 3,333 or something, right? I don't think you can find that many, cannot find that many swing highs and row. Well, probably be the best. I'm kidding, kidding, right? I know you mean three, right? Okay, a lot of you guys answer two, three, two, three, three, right? And the one answer one, which is correct, multiple, multiple levels, right? So ideally, right? Ideally, you want three. Three is a sweet spot, okay? Three is a sweet spot when you're looking at multiple swing highs, you know, looking minimally for one, two, I forgot how to write my numbers, one, two, three. Three is a minimum level. And of course, you don't need the levels who line up exactly. So you notice in this example, one level is higher, one level is lower, and look what I did, right? A highlight level, and you highlight an area, right? So as you're trading, most of the time, right? You don't, not all levels will line up exactly at a single peak, right? Especially swing high and swing lows, right? They're more effective when you look at it in terms of zones. Now the truth is, right? We have, let's just say, we have, I'm gonna give you a case study over here, okay? We've got one swing high, two swing high, three swing highs, okay? And we got one swing high, two swing high, three swing high, four swing high, okay? This one, you have, you have about an area about this area. Let's just say you have this area over here. Is that where I can have a ticker? No, I can't have a, oh, highlighter, right? Where's my highlighter? Okay, wrong color, sorry, okay. Okay, in this case, you have, oh, I never knew the highlighter was so terrible, okay? You got this level over here, okay? In this case, you have, oh, control Z doesn't work. Okay, in this case, you have this level over here, okay? Now, this is, this is option A, this is option B. Which is stronger, right? Which is stronger? Is A stronger or is B stronger? This one has one, two, three, this one has one, two, three, four. A lot of you guys are answering B, right? A lot of you guys are answering B, right? And the answer is A, the answer is A. Right, why it is A? Why is A? It's because A has a smaller area, right? We have three students, right? You have a nice, strong area over here, compared to this area over here. The zone is bigger, sure. You managed to get the fourth level, but it compromise your zone. It compromise how, you know, it compromise the zone, imagine, right?  It becomes like this single paper and it's very, very strong. But if the paper you only fold it like, you fold it twice and three times, you can still tear it, right? But if you fold it one time, two times, three times, four times, five, six, seven, eight times, and use a very thick layer, when you try to tear it, it's very tough. It's the same thing with support and resistance, right? Four has more confirmations, but it compromise the thickness, right? The thicker support and resistance area, the weaker it is, okay? The thicker a zone, the weaker it is. And that's one of the important things I want you guys to take away, okay? Now let's say, let's continue, let's continue, right? Now let's talk about the psychology of the pullback. Now that I've taught you guys swing highs and swing lows, I'm gonna share with you a little bit about pullback, support and pullback resistance. They are my favorite. They are my favorite support and resistance, right? More than anything else I'm teaching, right? This support and resistance is one of my favorite. And it also happens to be one of the most effective, okay? One of the most effective. Now, okay, the psychology of the pullback. Let me teach you about the psychology of the pullback. Now, so a pullback happens like this, right? So you got price has reacted once, reacted two times, reacted three times, right? So you got resistance area. Now when price comes up to here, right? You got one swing high, two swing high, three swing highs, right? What do you think most traders are doing over here, right? Assume that we do not, we're not able to see anything by the side over here. Are more traders looking to sell or more traders looking to buy when price is over here? Are more traders looking to sell or are more traders looking to buy? Right, I got kind of when you say sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, buy, buy, all right, okay? Well, there's a little bit of a split, right? You got Sarah saying sell, they got Ibrahim, George saying sell, Ibrahim says buy, Calvin sell, but I sell because if price failure, right? All right, so yeah, the majority of people, right? Majority of people at this point here, assuming price has not broken out yet, they are actually selling. They're looking to sell because it only makes sense, right? Because if price reverse once, it reverse twice, reverse three times, there's a nice little chance that price will reverse fourth time, right? Because that is called swing high resistance, right? Now, one of my favorite trade, I mean, of course we can use that to trade. We usually use that and combine it with Fibonacci, projections, retracement, extensions, expansions, you know, each Moku, trend lines, you know, combined to trade, but if we're just looking at it purely in support of resistance and you see that price has repeatedly failed to break past this level, all right? What you're likely to do is to sell there. Now, this is the beauty of it. What happens when price breaks past this level? When price breaks past this level, the people who are selling, they are now suffering losses, okay? They're suffering losses, right? You know, they're losing a little bit of money, right? They're losing money, you're losing money, you're losing money, right? They're being taken on the right. They start questioning their existence. They're, oh man, I should not trade, right? I'm losing so much, I'm losing so much. I can't sleep at night. Oh wow, you know, it's the universe against me. What should I do next, right? What do I do when they sell my house or every no state? They go on this nightmare, right? Because most of the time, you know, traders, depending on a stop loss, most of the time they just let it ride, right? And the majority of these traders, right? They're just being taken for a ride, right? They're holding on to their selling positions. They're being taken for a roller coaster of an emotional journey, right? They're suffering losses and you know, it's not good.  Why am I suffering so much losses? Now price then starts to come down here and they start come down and they're like, hey, you know what, maybe there is hope in this world after all, all is not lost, you know, there is, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, right?  And it goes back to the entry, the entry where they exited from. At this level, if you were a trader who initially held onto your selling positions over here, would you, what will you do here? Would you sell more? Will you close at your trade? What will you do? When price finally comes back down to here, we got Charles saying he keeps the trade, which he's saying close, close, hedge. Marty, when you're saying hedge, I'm just gonna assume that you're gonna close the trade, right? So I'm gonna touch on the myth of hedging in a bit at one entry, all right? So strong supply of some, right? So yeah, quite a number of you guys say close. And yes, so when you close the trade, you need to square it off, right? So essentially you buy, right? To close off your short position, you need to buy, right? If you have short positions, you need to close it off. You need to buy. So when you buy, a whole bunch of people would be buying and that causes the prices to do a nice little bounce. This is the psychology of the pullback trade. So people are saying, buy on the pullback, buy on the pullback. Why is a pullback working, right? It works particularly well for this kind of horizontal pullback where once price kind of breaks out of it and it comes back, right? It comes back all the way over here, right? If it comes back here, the reason why the pullback works very well is because there were a whole bunch of people here that were thinking is gonna drop, right? They were taken for a ride. The moment it comes back down to here, right?  To close off a selling position, you need to buy. So when you buy, along with everyone else who is jumping in on the trade, right, that's why you tend to see price make a nice little bounce. So that is the psychology of the pullback and it's one of the most effective upon a resistance levels. Now, I notice, right, Martio, and actually a couple of people did mention hedge, you know? What's the concept of hedging? How many of you guys happen to use hedging in your trading strategy? Can you guess? Maybe if you do or if you don't, maybe you can share it in the check section so I can get a rough gauge. Yeah, so I can see that, Dioban, always do it on demo. It's kind of like a counter trade, like hedging a bit, right? George doesn't do it, right? Her mother doesn't do it. Let me see the other. Attend this, right? Okay, so what does hedging mean? Hedging means that if you have a short, let's just say you're short 100 positions over here, hedging means that you plus 100 positions over here. You buy a trade in the other direction. Right, so let me talk about the concept of hedging, right?  So your risk exposure is zero. If price goes up or price goes down, your risk exposure is zero. Now, when it comes to hedging, especially CFDs, why it is not, so who knows what swap is, right? Who knows what swap is?  Yes, it's a charged overnight, right? That's right, Richie, right? So technically people think about it, right? That swap is, I know if you, I can see your answers are correct, right? So your swap is like overnight charges, right? So if you think about hedging, you have zero exposure. The problem is that if you are playing swaps on this, you now pay swaps on this, right? If you're playing commission on this, right, you got a commission per trade, now you're playing commission on this. So you're not having zero exposure. You're having double swaps and you're having double, right? You're having double, you're paying double commission, okay? Yes, everyone has to find a swaps of three times. So even though you think that you're hedging, you have zero exposure, you end up paying double the amount because you need to pay to buy a position, right? In the spirit of hedging, so you end up paying double the commission and pay double the swap. That is the danger of hedging versus if you just close off this trade, right? If you just close off the trade instead of hedging it, right?  You're not just holding the trade for another one month. You need to pay swaps for another one month, right? So that's why when it comes to hedging, it's not just a zero sum game. It might be a negative sum game, especially in CFD trading. There are times you hedge your risk, right? There are times you hedge your risk when you're trading futures, right? You want to lock in the price of oil, lock in the price of gold because of your, the business needs that you have, right? There's a concept to hedging there, right? But the traditional hedging that most people use in trading is not what they, is not that effective because of the commissions you pay, right? I believe for some futures, you don't even pay the commissions, right? And that's the thing which you should take a look at, right? If you're trading, if you love to hedge, Tick Meal has this great thing, right? And I encourage you guys to search Tick Meal Futures. Very few people know that Tick Meal actually has futures, right? As you can see over here, right? Tick Meal actually has futures, right? Tick Meal, you can see a whole bunch of stuff over here, right? These are not the only ones they have, right? They have an entire range of instruments that you can have over here, you know, I think for sure hundred. It's quite a wide range of instruments, futures you can trade. Very useful, right? If you're hedging, right? So if you only go to the concept of hedging, it's very useful, right? At the same time, you know, if you want to look at volume, right? You notice that some of the stuff here, you got the Japanese yen, right? If you are looking for volume, a reliable volume when it comes to trading, especially currencies, right? Which you know, you know, it's not, it's subjective from broker to broker, but if you're looking for volume, right? A great place, especially looking at volume for FX, is actually to look at futures because it trades through a centralized exchange. Hence your volume is much more reliable, okay? So again, it goes all the way back to hedging. I know I digress a bit, but this kind of general knowledge is very useful when you come to trading, right? Even if you reduce, you know, tweak your strategy so you don't double enter into positions to pay double the swap and double the commissions, that might be the thing that you need to match your profit factor from 0.95 to maybe 1.03, right? And to be a profitable trader, right? And these are the things because sometimes people don't realize that trading, right? A large part of trading, also you need the factor in the spreads, you need to factor in the commissions, you need to factor in the swaps, right? Because all that eat away from your profit, okay? Now let's go back to today's topic. Let's go back to today's topic. I want to teach you the opposite is true for pullback resistance. So this one is what we're calling pullback support. This one we're talking about pullback resistance. Same thing, you look for prices to bounce minimally two to three times, right? Two to three times. If you form a nice little support area, price finally breaks this level, right? The traders who are expecting it to go up are now holding on to their long positions and they're being taken for, right? They're losing a lot of money.  Okay, touch typing. I have no idea what touch typing means. If you don't mind maybe expanding a little bit more, right? So yeah, anyone who gets into a trade, a long position here, by the time price comes back here, they're looking to get off their position, they're looking to close off their position, right? And this is where they basically go short to net off their position. And that is what gives you the momentum, the volume, right? To really push prices down, really effective in calling reversals, right? There's a pullback resistance. We look at the markets right now to find some examples of it, right? We look at the markets right now to find some examples of it. So an example over here, right? If you notice, if you notice, this was a nice little swing low, right? Let's just do a little bit of a bar replay. Bar replay again, sorry. Bar replay feature over here. Nice little bit of a swing low over here, okay? Why is it a nice swing low? Nice swing low over here, right? And you can see price from a nice little support level over here, right? We're talking, let me just work through it with you guys. Bounce up nicely, bounce up nicely, price coming all the way down, people expecting to bounce up, right? People are expecting it to bounce up, right? So it drops, drops, drops, drops, drops, right? And it finally comes here, right? Everyone's expecting prices to kind of do a nice little bounce over here. But what happens is that prices don't bounce and instead it drops. So when it drops, the moment it breaks this level, it goes from a swing low support to a pullback support, okay? It goes from a swing low support to a pullback support, okay? The drops, drops, drops, drops, drops, all right? Okay, we're being taken for, right? The people who are holding onto their original long positions are being taken for one hell, of a right, right? The starting question, man, this is tough, I should not, you know, I should have put my stop loss closer, I should have closed off my trade, right? They are being taken for a tough time, just like what we said, right? And prices start to inch back over here, it starts to inch back, inch back, inch back, right? You can see it's starting to come back over here, right? And what happens when prices, let's see, let's see, prices start, there you go. The moment it touches here, right? Don't zoom in here, can you see? The moment it touches this, right? People close off their trade, right? They have pending positions, they have stop loss at break even, or the stop loss will cut off the trade, right? The moment it happens, this movement is very, very occurs very, very often, right? Let me just zoom in over here. This movement over here happens very often where price is rejected from there, right?  So this happens very, very often in the pullback resistance, right? The pullback support, right? You will notice it happened a lot of times in the market structure, right? Usually if it's only one time, it's less effective, you can combine once or twice, right? You can find two swing lows which are finally broken. That is usually a good sign of a, to play a good pullback trade, right? It is not very effective if it's only one time, right? So for example, if market is trending downwards like that, you know, there's only like, it's only one swing low level, right? It's not that effective, right? To just take the trade from here, right? And then you take another trade from here, another trade from here. That is too, it's too fairytale, right? It's not gonna be that effective, right? So even though we're looking at the downtrend over here, right, you can see this movement down here, I actually factored in this big support level over here, right? It's important for me to factor in that this swing low, this swing low and this swing low are both connected. Wow, that's a very nice straight line, right? That I just drew freehand, right? Years of experience, I'm so lucky, right? Oh, wow, look at that, man. Comes with experience, I guess. Now, okay, so that is a concept of pullback support. Happens very, very often, right? Let's see, let me just try to find different kind of examples over here, okay? This is a very, very nice example I want to touch on a tool, right? Let's replay, yes, maybe over here. The more times it bounces off, the better, right?  All around this area over here, okay? Nearly really nice reactions. So we're gonna highlight this as a nice little bit of a resistance area over here, okay? So price is reacted of multiple times when price comes back up here again, right? Injing up, injing up, injing up, holy smokes, okay? We expected prices to reverse from here. A majority of people, because of the one, two, three swing high resistance over here, right? However, price does not break, does not reverse and it goes up. As you can see over here, right? Now, this is the beauty of it, right?  So people are being taken for a ride over here. They don't like it, right? But the pullback happens really quickly, I think. There you go. So it comes all the way up there, then it pulls back. Now, this is what I call the, you know, one, this is the pullback that we're looking for to go up, right? So it does a nice little pullback. You can see pulls back to the area, pulls back to the area, and then it starts going from there. As you can see, right? This is the pullback that you're looking for to take the trade. You might have multiple opportunities to get in, right? But this is a very, very effective. The more levels, right? If you want, two is the minimum, okay? Two is the minimum, but you can find more than two. If you can find three, right? If you can find four, right? Four levels that finally get broken, look for the pullback, get in on the trade, you know, it's a pretty decent probability of getting a profitable trade on that, right? One of my favorites, right? Of course, in this case, when you're making the pullback, some additional considerations, right? You can consider, right? The next, nope, over here, right? Where is my templates? 23% retracement that people might be looking for, right? 23% retracement, maybe even a nice trend line support that goes up all the way, right? That supports it, I believe. There was sort of a trend line, yeah. Could be a channel support too, right? Different levels that suggest that price will bounce up from here, okay? So when you all combine together, you have a higher probability trade. So even though when it comes to trading, right? It's not about finding the perfect blueprint to profitability, right? Instead, it's about finding multiple different studies that agree with each other, okay? What do I mean by that? What do I mean by that? Okay, let's just say, look at where guy is, right? So majority of us are guys. Let's just say we want to buy a car. We want to buy a car, right?  If you go to a Mercedes car dealership, right? And you ask them, is Mercedes a good brand? What are they gonna say? Are they gonna say yes or are they gonna say no, right? Well, the majority of them, they're gonna say yes. Yeah, it's gonna say yes, correct? Because it is them, right? I didn't say get out, get out, buy something, right? See, that's the thing, when you go to this kind of, yeah, they're trying to sell it, right? So that's the thing. But when you go to a BMW workshop, they're gonna say, yeah, BMW is great, Mercedes sucks, right? If you go to Audi, Audi is gonna say, yeah, Audi rocks, right? But Mercedes sucks, right? But what if, so you can see, they're all supporting, in each camp, they only support their own camp, right? So if you're like the Mercedes camp, you could be like a stochastic, RSI, MacD, you're all the same camp. You're all gonna say that the market's overbought, right? If you're looking at momentum, you're looking at moving averages, right? Moving averages could be the BMWs, right? All of them are gonna say, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, the market is overbought, right? So they're all gonna agree with each other. But what if, you know, the people at Mercedes say, yeah, you know, actually Tesla is pretty good, right? The people at BMW say, yeah, you know, Tesla is pretty good too, right? The people at Audi say, yeah, Tesla is pretty good, right? If different groups of people all say something else, it's pretty good. Then you can trust it even more, and there's a higher probability that Tesla is actually pretty good. And that's the concept when it comes to trading. Do not get overexcited when everyone in Mercedes is telling you that the Mercedes is good. What do I mean by that? It's that don't get overexcited when the stochastic oscillator, the RSI indicator, the MACD indicator, all of them are telling you that the market is overbought because they are all in the same car showroom. They're all selling you the same Mercedes, right? Don't get overexcited when the moving average, right? The Ichimoku crowd, they're all telling you that the market is bullish. They're all the same showroom, right? But if different studies, different groups of people tell you that something is good, then you know you're onto something, right? It's always, I know I just picked this example out of the air, but I hope it gets you a better idea when it comes to trading that, you know, don't just use support and resistance, right? So in this example here, don't just use, where am I? Don't just use support, right? You must join support, right? Then of course you join, maybe join channels. Sorry, this is a terrible channel, right? Join channels, right? After join channels, maybe join and Ichimoku, right? After join Ichimoku, maybe you do a Fibonacci retracement. So instead of just one study, right? You have the support and resistance camp. You got the channel camp. You got the Ichimoku camp. You got the Fibonacci camp, right? You got multiple people telling you that the levels are good, right? And that makes it a better trick. It increases the chance of getting into a profitable trade. Okay, and that's one very, very important thing that I want to teach you guys when it comes to trading. Okay, last thing I want to touch on, of course, is over here, the overlap support and overlap resistance. Overlap is very simple. If this, when price broke out, if this was a pullback, when price finally bounces off the pullback, the moment price bounces off the pullback support, it turns into an overlap support. It shows that it's an area of interest. Yeah, it's running a breath, right? It shows that it's an area of interest, right? Meaning that you can see that there's one resistance here, price reacted off here. Yeah, resistance becomes support and basically prices respect this level. When prices come back up there, you can see it react off there again and it comes down. The more time price react the bottom and the top, the bottom and the top, that's where it becomes a pretty strong overlap, a pretty strong overlap support or resistance, right? That's one of the key things that I want to show you guys and how we can combine it all together, right? So in this example, right? We have, this is a pullback resistance that we're looking for, right? So this is a very simple example. Pullback resistance over here, H-moku cloud resistance over here, right? And I think maybe it's a 23% Fibonacci retracement over here.  You can see over here, right? Basically that's how you combine multiple of it together, right? Let me see what's my example over here, right?  That gives you the highest probability of this bounce happening over here. And I hope you get the idea, right? Of course, the Q&A session is still open, right? So if you have questions that you need to clarify regarding this trading approach, please send them through. I do want to let you guys know that we're going to touch on trend lines and channels in our next session, right? I'm going to send you the link here. I wonder if there's another link or if we have this link, I'm going to send it to you guys, right? This link over here, I'm sorry, I'm going to send it to the host and panelists. I'm going to send it to everyone. Hamid, what are you trying to confirm first, right? So please send over this is our next session, on the trend lines and channels, right? It really takes a deep dive into trend lines and channels, right? Do you use Wix? Do you not use Wix? How many touches, right? How to use it as part of a larger trading strategy? Please check that one out, right? And I'm going to do as our, because we didn't manage to record some of the past poll results, right? I'm going to run a simple poll right now, right? For you guys, right? Just so to share some feedback that you guys have me to help me be a better trader, help me run these webinars slightly better for you guys, right? There you go. How you rate this webinar from one is to five, five being the best, right? So this helps me know how I can better improve. Of course, you can rate it anything you want, right? You can rate it anything you want, right? But don't worry, I won't hunt you down if you rate one, but if you do rate it, you know, whether it's one or two or three, right? Let me know, let me know which areas you want to see me improve a little bit more on, send it in the comments section, right? And we're always trying to fine tune and improve our webinars a bit more and a bit more so that, you know, it can teach you guys better, to be better traders, right? That's why I'm trying to focus a lot more over here, right? It's not just providing you guys the best kind of trading instruments, right? But we're always trying to listen to you guys, right? What do you want to learn more? Do you want to learn about Fibonacci? Do you want to learn about Elliott Wave? Do you want to learn about harmonics? How advanced do you want to go? Do you want to go about trade management, right? No, well, yes, I'll be answering that in a second, right? A copy of this is actually on the TickMeal YouTube, okay? Right, so all right. Equal highs, equal lows, all right? Let me just end this poll right now. We got, okay, we got about 55% who participated, right? Yeah, I think it's here. Yeah, 55% that participated, right? I'm going to end this poll, right? I'm going to share the results if you guys, right? Thank you very much, right? Two of you guys rated one. It breaks my heart, but that's okay, right? Let me know if, yeah, five is the highest score. Get three, you want to rate me 10, that'd be great too, right? But let me know if there's any way I can improve, right? I'll do my best, of course. I'm not sure if you guys can see the screen here, but I'll do my best to add on whichever you feel might be missing, right? And send it a comment section because there's no other way I would know how to know your feedback unless you send it in the comment section, all right, guys? Okay, right? I'm going to end this poll over here, right? Nah, nah, not going to be so bad. I don't want to kick them out, right? I always take it as good feedback. All right, so guys, right? So you're going to go to YouTube, take a meal, right? I'm going to show you how to get access to that. I'm going to send in the playlist. Here you go, ultimate forest trading masterclass. I'm going to send it to everyone over here. Is there any more education mark forex we can get? Yes, so we're going to launch our VIP room soon.  If you want, right? Just to get lay, have a glimpse on it, okay? Yeah, so if you want to tune in, right? That is the, these are some of the past webinars you can tune in. I'm just going to show you the ultimate, the TickMeal VIP room. For those of you guys who are here for the first time who have not seen it, I'm going to share my screen. You share? Okay, I'm not sure if you guys can see my screen over here, right? This is the VIP room, which we're in the final stage of compliance launch, right? It's actually a VIP room where, as long as a TickMeal client, right, you get to come in here. We have, we have ranks, we have badges, you know, we have leaderboards where it can come in. But most importantly, right? Let's just say you have a question, right? Let's just say you have a question on a pound dollar, right? So got all the different pop traders over here. You have a question on pound dollar, it actually helps you, right? Let's just say you're looking at this and you're like, eh, do you think price might reverse from here, right? You could just draw this resistance area over here and you can do this at mention, right? At mention, at mention Desmond, right? And I, hey, do you think price might reverse from this area? What area are you referring to? You just highlight the text. You click this link object to text. You select the object that just drew on the chart and then you confirm and send it through, right? So what happens is that when I'm reading it for the first time, you can see, hey, Desmond, do you think price might reverse from this area? And when you hover your mouse over it, you can see that the area lights up. So I know exactly what you are referring to. I can click this part here and I can see that I can have a dedicated discussion knowing which level you're referring to, right? So I can add in my own comments, you know, I can add my own comments, I can, hey, buddy, right? I can do all the stuff like, you know, reacting to messages, stuff like this, right? It's all built into this VIP room, right? We're gonna roll out access to it soon, right? No, I do not trade for others, Kanti, right? But we actually guide them in this trading room. So we have all the whole range of instruments from futures to FX to indices, right? We've got fundamental news, we've got everything here in the VIP room help you to be a better trader, right? It should be rolled out in the next couple of weeks once we clear the last bit of stuff with compliance.  You can talk about the different, sorry. Oh, you can't mention it here, right? The different hashtags, right? You wanna say like, Desmond, take a look at say Eurodollar, you know, Eurodollar for me, right? It's all over there, right? You can click on this jumps to Eurodollar. It's a very, very interactive kind of place where you can practice your analysis in real time and we can correct you in real time on it, okay? So yeah, it's a, this is stay tuned, right? We should be rolling out to you. Well, it's actually, it should be meant by analysts throughout the day, five days a week, probably not over the weekend, right? Again, have Richie asking, you know, you know, what are the small or less active hours of the VIP room, right? It's more or less active during the weekend, no, during the weekdays, right? Different analysts to be tuning in to help you guys, right? You can read up our profiles, you can ask us questions over there, right? So one thing that we need to run a poll on, right? Do leave your responses so we know who are the people who are interested and we can reach out to them when we're going to launch it first, right? Let's see, where is it, is it a poll? Yeah, I can, I'm gonna launch this quick poll, right? And can let us know, right?  All right, so we know that how soon we can roll this out to you guys, right? We are, how can prioritize it, right? You will basically get direct access to prop traders, right? Traders who trade for a living, traders, award-winning traders, right? You know, you get a direct line to them and say, hey, Desmond, what's your view on goal, right? Hey, Desmond, what's your view on your dollar, right? And we were able to jump in and say, hey, what timeframe are you looking at? I can do our best to kind of help you out over there, okay? Right, yeah, but so this is just part one of two questions, right? To have a rough quick gauge on the interest level of this VIP room, okay? Just give me a second, right? We'll close this here, I think it's 10 seconds or so, right? Okay, oh, sorry, I forgot to, right? We need to record this for, to share with the marketing team, right? And then the last question I have, right, is that for you guys, right? Would you, if we required you to have a TinkMill account to get access to this VIP room, would it be okay with you, right? If you're already a TinkMill client, just, you know, put you already a TinkMill client, but if something where, you know, we're thinking like, what are the requirements to get access? We're trying to keep it free, right? We're trying to keep it free such that, you know, you don't need to pay any money to get access into it, right? Instead, as long as you have a TinkMill account, right? Minimum $500, maybe $1,000, right? And then we'll give you access to it, right? There's the thing which we want to check with you guys if it's okay, right? And, you know, wanna try and make it as accessible to everyone as possible, right? And so this is one of the important questions which we like to ask you guys to get a quick gauge, right, whether this is fine with you, right? If you're already a TinkMill client, the majority of you guys are already TinkMill client, that's great, right? Otherwise, yeah, I can see the majority of you actually say, yes, which is great, right? And if it's no, it's purely fine too, right? We should be released in the next two weeks, right? Yeah, so Matthew, access to the TinkMill VIP room should be released in the next couple of weeks, right? Wait for Luna to pick up again, right? Yeah, I know, if you were going to Luna, it's tough stuff, man, it's tough stuff, okay? All right, let me just get this done. Okay, I'm going to end the poll over here. Okay, guys, thank you very much for sticking through this webinar, right? Okay, it's a techno. If you want to see all my previous webinars, I'm just going to send it in this comment section here, right, tune in here, right? That's where you can see all the previous webinars. I'll be touching more advanced topics. We might be going towards a rotation between live market analysis and a weekly session, where every Monday we're looking at educational and webinars, educational, webinars, educational, webinars, right? It is possible to get into the TinkMill VIP room. We will let you know once it's available, okay? Can't answer that in a bit, all right, in our next session because I need to hand over the time to the next webinar, person who's going to jump on his next webinar soon. Thank you very much for sticking through this entire webinar. I really enjoyed you guys with me, right? Bear with me. I think I'm losing my voice a bit. That's why I lose my voice, right? But yeah, I know it's been a great time. Yeah, some of you guys I can see asking in private that, yeah, my baby's fine. I just became a dad three weeks ago, right? So I'm not sure if you can see my eye bags, right? I'm not sure if you can see my eye bags, right? I think, thank you very much. Thank you guys, right? I want to name him Elliot, right? So I can always have the forever running joke that, you know, I like to teach the Elliot wave theory, right? Everyone can name it, yeah, that's right. All right, Elliot. But yeah, my wife, the other one, named me Elliot, so his name is Lucas, right? Not well, right? It works, it works, yeah. But yeah, I feel Elliot is the headache. Yeah, trust me, I would, maybe I would can say, yeah, I mean, Elliot is driving me nuts, right? And then she'll say, how dare you say that? They're like, oh no, no, no, no. I mean, the Elliot wave is driving me nuts. Oh well, but yeah, if only I could do that, you know, it was funny because when I, now we are a little bit off topic. So, you know, if you want to jump off the webinar, feel free to jump off the webinar, right? I'm not gonna touch on anything more educational, right? Amanda, don't worry, right? But yeah, there's a point, right? When my wife, because usually after the wife, you know, she delivers, right? The husband goes down and registered the name, right? So, you know, I was holding the paper. I was like, oh man, I have this paper. I can write down anything I want and she can't do anything. Right, I can give him any name. I can name him Ronaldo, right? I can name him Messi, anything that she won't have. She won't have a say, right? She might be pissed, but she might not realize. Right, it was so tempting. I was like, yeah, you know what, he's a guy. What's wrong with Ronaldo? No, I think it's a nice name, right? But yeah, in the end, my common sense, right? And maybe my survival instinct prevailed, right?  Just write the name Lucas and get out of there, right? Don't try to give you a funny middle name, Lucas Messi, Lucas Mora or something, right? Then you'll just get out. So that's why I'm here today. I'm alive, I'm alive, right? Because my common sense has prevailed and kept me alive. Anyway, guys, yeah, the next webinar will be in, in the next webinar will be in two weeks, right? We might be moving to a weekly session, right? Rotating between life, practice and theory, practice and theory, so every month, every alternate session, maybe if a life market analysis, we practice what we learn, right? And every alternate session, you know, it'll be educational session where you learn stuff together. Yeah, photo, yeah, photo your wife. That's right, Yosie, right? Happy wife, happy life, that's what they say. All right, man, I'm glad to see so many of you guys resonate with what I'm saying. All right, anyway, thanks for tuning in, guys. Right, next time, if I have a little bit more time, right? I can hang out, have some whiskey session with you guys, right now that market's opening, whoever flies into Singapore, right? Yeah, I'm here in Singapore, you know, if you happen to be around Singapore, let me know. I can have you as a guest session, you know, we can have a nice drink together, right? It'll be a fun session, right? We love you guys over here in Singapore, right? Oh, it'll be there in July, it'll be the great, there'll be great Guzman. Let me know, right? Let me know if we can go out for a drink, can swing by the office, it'll be a fun time, right? It's good stuff, man, good stuff, right? That's it for me, guys, thank you so much. Remember, stay safe, trade safe, right? And I'll catch you guys in the next webinar, all right? Peace out, homies, take care, bye-bye. That's nice, techno, right? I'll see you guys either in the webinar or in person when you swing by. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you, Kanizawa, Bernard, Noel, Kelvin, Fairos, Godfrey, cool. Thank you very much, Mateo. See you guys soon. Peace out, guys, peace out.


If you've just landed on this station, this is where I do cycling videos, both inspirational and entertaining stories, do a little bit of vlogging, very much focused on cycling, and also some deep dive road cycling product reviews, which is what I'm gonna do today. So if that sounds up your alley, consider subscribing below. Or if you like Bradley Wiggins, apparently I look a lot like him. That could be another reason to get on board and subscribe. Now in this video, what I wanted to do was share with you my personal experiences and review my own personal road bike. For the first time ever, you see I run a company called Bike Chasers, an online marketplace for bikes, and over there I've done a ton of road bike reviews in the past. But never have I reviewed my own personal road bike. And after riding this thing for 12 months now, I've got some interesting insights I think I can share with people out there, particularly those that are in a similar boat to mine. So an experienced road cyclist versus an entry level road cyclist. And I think because this bike is at an entry level price point, two and a half to $3,000, there are a lot of entry level cyclists that would have this on their contemplation list. Now I built this bike down at my local bike shop, Hampton Cycles, about 12 months ago. And the way it's been built is very similar to the current specialized LA Sprint Comp, which retails for about two and a half thousand dollars. So this bike comes with Shimano 105 gearing. I've got an old quark power meter, just down here, and also some Fulcrum V wheels. So sort of entry level aluminum wheels. And the 2019 specialized LA Sprint is no different to this one here outside of the fact that specialized in 2019 are offering a disc brake version. So the two primary things that I wanna focus on today was one, why do I personally like this bike? Number two, if you are an entry level cyclist, what are some of the things you need to be thinking about if you are looking at this bike? And what I wanted to do here is compare this bike, which is predominantly aluminum, to a carbon fiber row bike at a similar price point. Before we go deep on these two aspects, let's have a look at some of the key characteristics of the specialized LA Sprint frame set. Now specialized HQ go on about this DeLuccio Smart World technology. I think I've said that name, right? Which strategically places more welding material where it's needed, resulting in an aluminum bike that's more compliant and considerably stiffer. According to specialized, but where I like to focus just as much as my time on material is that frame geometry. And this bike right here is very similar to the specialized Tarmac, which is the all-round race bike from specialized, but perhaps even more similar to the specialized Venge, which is the aerodynamic race machine. So it takes bits and pieces geometry-wise from both of those bikes, but is more similar to the Venge and even more aggressive in some aspects to the Venge. An example of that would be the head tube right here. Now the head tube on the specialized LA is 130 mil. On the Venge it's 133 mil, and on the Tarmac it's 143 mil, which basically means the rider on the LA is gonna get down and super aggressive. Now you've also gotta take consideration the length from the bottom bracket, which is considered to be the stack. That basically runs from here up to this point here. And the LA is more aggressive than both of those bikes combined. So this really is quite an aggressive proposition from a geometry perspective. Now because the specialized LA is aluminium, in order to reduce some of the buzz you traditionally get with alloy frames from the road, what specialized have done is they've got carbon fiber forks and this is taken from the Tarmac S-Works and the seat post here, the carbon seat post, that comes from the specialized Venge. So really it's a blend of both bikes, perhaps leaning a little bit further towards the Venge and more aggressive than the Venge in a number of ways. Now what do I personally like about this road bike right here? When I sold my Tarmac S-Works SL5 last year, I was looking for a road bike that was gonna tick four primary boxes. The first one was I had less than $3,000 to spend. Number two, I wanted a road bike that looks sexy. I'd come from a specialized S-Works SL5 and I only had $3,000 to spend and the LA Sprint Graffiti Frame here looks super hot and specialized due to a good job with the LA's of releasing new models every year, limited edition models that really tick that box. Number three, I wanted a road bike that was good for criterion racing and also good for fast bunch riding. I raced in the local Crits here in Melbourne and I also do a number of fast bunch rides. So something that was aggressive in geometry and something that was also aerodynamic. The fourth box I wanted to tick was a bike that I could sort of bang around a little bit. I ride on gravel roads a fair bit here in Melbourne for training purposes and I also travel with my road bike a fair bit. I put it in a bike bag and take it on a narrow plane and in the past with a carbon fiber high-end road bike, I did get a little bit nervy with stone chips and the bike being damaged whilst on a plane. Now this bike does an incredible job of ticking all those four boxes. In fact, as you look at it right now, it's a little bit banged up. I came off in the Dandenong's about three or four weeks ago and the bar tape here is a bit banged up. I do have to fix that. And it's also rather dirty because I've been riding on the gravel trails over the last number of days. But that doesn't really bother me. Although I did recently get told off by a very well-respected cyclist here in Melbourne about the state of my bike. All right, we just finished our ride. I'm getting a little bike lesson here. So what have I done wrong? I'm just disgusted with the state of the... Back end of the bike here, look at this mark. Looks like it hasn't seen a washing. So that's what I really like about this bike. The next thing that I wanted to talk about is if you're an entry-level cyclist and there's a fair chance there is a lot of you out there that are entry-level because this is in that price bracket, $2,000 to $3,000 which is an entry-level price bracket. What are some of the things you need to be thinking about? What are some of the considerations when it comes to this road bike? Now, what I thought would be interesting here, I recently road tested the Trek Amanda S5. And it was because I was actually away with the family and it was a higher bike. But it's at a very similar price point to this bike here but it is carbon fiber. And the reason why I wanted to focus on carbon fiber versus aluminium and there's many rabbit holes we can go down here, right? There's molding flexibility, there's price, there's stiffness, there's weight but I really wanted to focus on the comfort side of things because if you are an entry-level cyclist, I think comfort is very important.  There's probably a fair chance you're less tolerant to road buzz and feeling the bumps throughout the bike going into your body. And you've probably haven't spent a lot of your life in a bike riding position. So having something that's a little bit more comfortable is perhaps gonna be better suited to your riding needs. Now to be fair with the Trek Amanda S5, it does have a much taller head tube here. So you sit up a little bit higher on the bike but your weight still does go into the rear of the bike and into your lower back. And what I found with the Trek Amanda S5 or a carbon fiber road bike is it really does absorb the road a lot better. It takes a lot of the buzz and bumps throughout the whole frame and doesn't deliver them directly into your body. Whereas the specialized LA sprint, one because it is an aggressive road bike, you're down a bit lower, you're in an aerodynamic position and it's aluminum so it fills the road quite a fair bit more is if you're gonna be riding say over 40 or 50 kilometers at a time, particularly on roads that are less forgiving out in the country, you're really gonna feel the impact of this bike. Now personally, because I'm riding to road cycling and I use this bike for training purposes as well as racing, but I plan to actually go and buy a high end road bike at some point in time and use this for training. I kinda like the fact that this bike is a little bit less forgiving. It's a little bit harsher because it means that it's gonna make me a stronger cyclist if I'm training on something like this versus a $10,000 road bike. But I'm conscious that if you're an entry level cyclist and you're just looking to get out there, ride with some friends, you're not really racing, you're not really using for training purposes, then I would personally be more inclined to go for something that isn't so aggressive in geometry and perhaps something that is carbon fiber. In summary, if your needs are similar to mine and you've got similar boxes to tick, I would definitely put this bike on your contemplation list. For me, it does a great job. However, if you've got $2,000 to spend, you're an entry level cyclist, just getting into the sport, I would definitely consider a bike that has more relaxed geometry and perhaps going down the carbon fiber route would be better suited to your needs. When I sold my Tarmac SL5, now what do I personally like? I was looking for a road bike that had to tick four primary boxes. Now what do I, before we go deep on these two points, let's have a look at some of the key aspects. Nope, stay, stay.