We're going to get started. If you want to chat or ask a question, you have to go down to the chat box. You go down to two individual users, choose my name, and you can type. Does everyone know how to do that? I'm going to put another high in here. Bob knows how to do it. So if we are going along and you have a question, you will write it in the room. Debra knows how to do it. OK, great. Welcome, everyone. Today's topic is, for those of you who don't know, my name is Melissa Armell. And I am a stock swish. And today's topic is going to be about options. And specifically how you can focus really just on trading options and nothing else if you don't want to. So I happen to do options and day trades. So if you want to earn a living doing options or make money part-time doing options and just focus on that, you can. Now, what would be the benefits of that, or why would you just focus on options, for example? Well, for example, if you do not have the 25,000 necessary for a margin account, you can trade options with a cash account and you can open up an options account with as little as $2,000. So if you don't have the over 25K to trade on margin, you may want to just focus on options. Another reason why you might want to focus on options is if you have an retirement account. So say you have a retirement account. You are not allowed to trade a retirement account on margin. You can, however, buy calls and sell them in your options account. And you can buy puts and then sell them in an options account. So for those of you that don't know what a call is, a call is a long, basically, in an option. A put is a short. Now, for those of you that don't know what I do, I mostly focus on shorting. But I do go long sometimes. And I will go long in options or do calls. But I mostly focus on the downside. So we're mostly doing puts. Although, again, I will do calls. And again, any questions I saw some people come in late, you can write it at the bottom of the chat. You have to choose my name and then type in a question. Now, if you also don't know what I do, besides the fact that I focus on shorting, because I am very focused on what I do every day, trying to find the best pick, I'm focused on the gap. So what do I mean? I'm looking every day for a gap. And I developed a system that ranks the gap to determine if that particular gap in the stock of the market will follow through in the direction of the gap. So I developed a system where I will rate the gap. That is how I make the picks and the choices that I use to trade, that even the options.  Now, let's go to, hey, Derek. I see Derek there. Deborah's asking about today. No, I did not do any video or AMD today. We can look at those charts. We can look at those charts. I watched AMD, but I didn't do it. We ended up doing today GIS as a day trade. And I didn't do any new options today, actually. I already have trades on. We did things earlier in the week. But here's an example. Does everybody see this? This is CCL. Can everyone see this as a daily chart of CCL? So first of all, let's just go over some very basics. What is a gap? A gap is a difference between the close and the open. CCL closed at 1580, 623. 623 was Friday. Monday was 626 and a gap down. Open at 1498. So this gap down. So we did a put, a put in CCL. So the high of the day was 1504. The low was 1390. And we bought the put and sold the put because it went to the target. The target was 14, fell, went to the target at 14, broke, went to 1390. We got in, got out. This was actually pretty cheap. But again, this is an inexpensive stock. We only do options with volume. Now, this is a good example just to show you, and I'm going to show you a few others here today, how you could focus on just doing options, even if you don't want to do any day trades. And trade and make money doing options each day. You get in, get out. Take it, get in, get out. Again, people, I think misunderstand options and they're looking for things that they don't always get and then they tend to lose an options or they don't do what I do, which is momentum trading. The whole point of momentum trading, and again, we do calls and we do puts. But momentum trading means you take the trade before the momentum comes in, then you get the momentum, then you're up, then you get out. This is not buy and hold forever or take a put and hold forever or whatever. I'm doing the weekly options. So essentially, even though options trades aren't on margin, you're almost pretty much sort of day trading them because you're basically holding them for a very short period of time. Now, you can hold trades overnight, and we're going to talk about some of those too. But some will go to the target the first day, the day that I call it, and CCL was one of these. So we got in, get out, boom, done. And again, why would you get out? You were up, we're looking for 50% to 100% in every single trade, and it went to the target. So on the options newsletter, if you decide to join it, I'll hold on a minute, my phone is gonna keep beeping. Let me just put it on the hook, hang on one second. Sorry, that was gonna keep beeping. If you decide to join the options newsletter, I give the targets in the letter, so you won't know where to get out, or you manage yourself based on your percentage of profit that you're looking to get in every trade. Now, for me, I do a combination of both. So I am looking for the target, and I am also looking for a certain ROI. In other words, I'm not gonna get out of a trade if I'm only up 10% or 15% or 20%, unless it's the very, very, very last day of the expiration of the option, and I have to get out of it.  So before I go to the next one I wanted to talk about, I will look at AMD, because I did look at that this morning, but then I never did anything with it. I'm not sure if it did anything, but I will look. No, I didn't do AMD, and that was a good decision here because Debra, was it you that was asking about AMD? There's nothing to do with AMD. So this was actually down this morning, and it was a nice gap this morning. It reversed. It ended up gapping down. It's still gapped down, but it's rallying with the market here today. So there's no play in this. You wouldn't short it, and if you went short it, you lost. You wouldn't go long. Why? Because it gapped down. So if you went long, obviously you made money, but this was not a good trade in my opinion. If you wanted to go long today, you would have looked for something strong in a bullish gap up, of which there was things to do today like that. So this is rallying today, but it's only rallying because the market's rallying. So if you went long this Debra, I would be out. This is not a trade that I would hold. And I don't think this was a good trade. And we actually looked at doing this to the downside today. Why? It was gapping down this morning. Okay. Actually, I'll show you where it was when I got up early and rolled out of bed. Here. So very early this morning, this was down at 105 and change. This is actually 4 a.m. 4 a.m. here. So I did look at it early this morning, but I didn't do it. It still ended up gapping down, but it did not gap down at 105, but it lifted on a gap down with the market. But that was something I was watching this morning early to short. We didn't do it then because it flipped. Now, gap fills is not something that I do. Why? Because it doesn't have a high win ratio of working. So while sometimes they work, sometimes anything works. Sometimes you can short a stock at new highs or go long something that's crap, but that doesn't have a high probability of working. So again, how to make money in the market. Everybody makes money some days. Traders that lose money year over year over year make money some days. That's what keeps them going. In order to make this worth your time and worthwhile to do it, so you're not wasting your time and wasting your bullets or your cash, you need to make money in more trades than you lose. And on top of that, you have to have some big winners. You have to have some big winners. What would be a big winner? I mean, again, we just got done talking about CCO. CCO, I didn't consider a big winner, but it certainly was a nice winner. It was a good winner, it was solid. What do I think was a big winner this week? Tesla. So I called a couple of puts in Tesla back since last week, actually, and they went. So again, while you can train options as if you're doing day trades, where you're in and out of the same day, you can also hold them overnight. Now, why would you do that if it didn't go yet? If the momentum didn't come into it yet? If you were down in the trade, okay, and you stole plenty of time left in it, you have a week left or no, you wouldn't kill it, okay? So there are many times where I'm in a trade that goes in my favor overnight and then I ended up being up a lot because I was down in the trade. I was already in it, took it, did it, wanted it to go, didn't go yet, but still have plenty of time left in it. And again, I'm always doing the weeklies, okay? Now, as far as Tesla, again, I'm going back to last week. So I called one, two, three. I called three trades in Tesla. I called the 250 puts, the 245 puts, and the 240 puts. And this is how it's set up. So on 622, I called the first trade. I called the 250 puts. It gapped down, reversed. If you took the trade, you were down into the close, boom. Gapped down here the next day, fell, started to go, boom. This is Monday the 26th, fell. I called the 245s here, they won here, and I called a third trade here, which was the 240s, which it almost got to, 240, 70. So that was a nice setup. And again, we ended up doing different strikes and getting different points in it, but it went to all these numbers. It took a series of three days. How did it make it down? It made it down from the gaps, okay? So again, I'll hold something overnight. Now again, if you're taking a trading, you're in an option and you have the cash account, you should be fine with holding the trade overnight, as long as you're okay with your risk. You should be fine holding it overnight, whether you're up a little, flat, or down, if your risk is okay. So this is again, something that's very important that people need to know. When you're trading options, again, not only do you have to have more winners and losers, you have to have your trades, all of your trades, if you do 10 trades a week, five trades a week, whatever, have to have the same risk or close to the same risk in every trade, otherwise you're also not gonna be consistent to even analyze your results to know what you're gonna do, to say, oh, I'm doing well or I could make these adjustments or I'm doing really great. You have to look at each trade to compare apples to apples. If your risk is $1,000 a train, then that's it or has to be close to that. Or if it's 500 or if it's 2,000 or whatever. This is not an exact science, but you can say I'm gonna take one contract of every trade. One contract in CCL, in those CCL puts, did not cost the same as one contract, for example, in Tesla. So you can always do the same contracts. One contract equals 100 shares. You have to say, oh, I'm gonna spend $1,500 per trade. Okay, then some of the ones that are on the lower cost position side are a little bit more inexpensive like CCL, compared to something like Tesla, you can load up. You can do more. You can do more. And everything we're doing, by the way, has volume. We're never ever taking options in any stock or at all without it having volume. And that's the same thing with my day trades. And I just think that's a good rule of thumb for whatever kind of trading you're doing, no matter what anyways. But anyways, this, while it looks strange, which actually one of the most profitable trades of the week, because the fact is that it followed through in again, down, boom, and fell. And again, this was a nice fat red bar on the 26th. Okay, now I'm gonna go look, since Deborah wanted me to look at NVIDIA, I will look at that quickly. And while I'm doing this, let me know if anybody has any questions. This again, Deborah, I would not have done for the same reason, I would not have done AMD. It gapped down. It just happens to be rallying with the market. Also, NVIDIA is a very expensive to trade. In order to make any money, any real money in NVIDIA, it's gotta go. It's gotta go like the dickens. It's gotta pop. We did NVIDIA, actually we did calls in NVIDIA back here. So, I mean, it's gotta make a move. This here was a good move, why? It gapped up. This here gapped down, so I would not do a call in it. I wouldn't go long in it. This is a strong stock, I will say that. But the only reason this is rallying today is because of the market. And as soon as the market gives it up, this will be done. I'm not even sure there's any risk to rewarding this here today because this is not a big bar for NVIDIA and it is expensive to train. Also, Mew has earnings out tonight. If Mew collapses, so will this. So, I don't know what you're doing with this right now, Deborah. I don't think this is a good trade either. Not that this isn't strong, not that you might not want to do a call eventually in this, but not at this juncture and not going into Mew earnings. Okay, any questions before I get to the next thing? Any questions about anything I said so far? You traded NVIDL once the market opened and traded at levels and leveraged NVIDIA? Okay. That sounds difficult. Again, some days I get up and I don't do anything at all. Some days I have a good gap and I do it and we're done. It's try to make trading as easy as you can for yourself. I mean, you could try to find something on any day to go long or short, weak or strong, calls or puts or whatever you want if you've got the market direction right. Why? Because most given days things will go with the market. So the market rally today, you could have gone long virtually almost anything and made money. It doesn't mean that that's a good trade and how many days does the market run for two hours or three hours up from the open? Rare, rare. So we did not do a put in this today, but I will show you the day trade we did in here today. I didn't do a put in it. I actually didn't even look at what this cost, but if you were in the trading room with me and you wanted to do a put, if they offer puts in general mills, this is GIS, I don't know if they do. I've never done a put in this, but you could have done a put instead of the day trade. Again, sometimes I'll look at something and say I want to get in and out as a day trade and I don't want to do a put, but sometimes I do both. Whatever I do though, I'm trying to make it as easy as possible for myself to make money. If I think it's going to be difficult, then the answer is always no, meaning don't trade, don't do anything, okay? And so I think a lot of people right now have 100% conviction this market's higher. Why? We were rallying today. We rallied yesterday. And whether this continues or not, I wrote this in the email yesterday. I don't have 100% conviction that that's the case, but we shall see. But either way, anything you choose to do, be very careful, because if you get the market wrong or you need the market for your trade, you're gonna have a tough time making money. Now, I'll just quickly show you what we did in this today. We shorted it, got in, got out, boom. Again, you could have done an option in this if there are even options in this and everyone looked up to see what they cost or the volume. But I didn't do one in that today. But you could have done options in other things today. Again, you would have looked, if you were gonna go long to buy something strong, you would have bought a call and in something weak, you would have bought a put. But if you're really someone that just doesn't want a day trade, you don't want to open a margin account or you don't have the money to open a margin account. Or the only cash that you have is the cash in your retirement account. And like I said earlier, you could not trade on margin with that. Then you must focus on options, particularly if it's your retirement account, you want to make sure that you're finding quality, quality, quality trades. If it's your retirement account, you don't want to lose.  No, you can't. If you lose money in your retirement account, you can't stick any more in. That's it, you lost money in your retirement account. And until the next time when you are able to do a contribution is the next time that you will be able to put more money in. It is not like a regular trading account. And you must be very, very careful trading a retirement account. I personally do not, I'm not trading my retirement account. I'm sitting in cash waiting for this market. I'm not long this market. And again, if you pushed me up against the wall and I was on Fox News Live and I had to answer the question, I'd say we're lower. I think we're lower. And I don't think we make a new high this year. And we're very close to doing that. So what is, there's six months left in the year. Either we're gonna make a brand new well-timed high this year in the market, or we're lower because there's six more months left in the year. And that is a long time, a long time. So we will make new highs if we keep going. We got plenty of time left to do it. I don't see it that way. And again, I put my money where my mouth is. I haven't gone on my retirement account because I don't wanna lose. I'm still young enough that, the market could come back even if we fall. But I know, particularly because I'm a trader that I would be extremely bothered if I bought positions in stocks or the market and we fell off watching my account turn upside down. And you know, that happened to a lot of people at the beginning of COVID in 2020 when the market had that massive sell-off. Of course the markets recovered since then, but it was very upsetting for people to look at their 401K statements in their IRA and see all the profits that they have been up from 2019 in the rally, you know, disappear in that sell-off. I was gonna say something else and I forgot what I was gonna say. Any questions, any questions so far? Now, one of the benefits of, oh, we were gonna talk about VA, one of the other benefits of doing options is taking a train, you can only lose what you have at risk. So basically, when you're taking a train, if you do risk $1,000 and the trade goes completely 100% against you, the only thing you're gonna lose is what? $1,000. So I don't use stops in my options. Basically the risk is a stop. So it's like the insurance. The stop is like the insurance, you can't lose any more than you risk. So in that sense, doing options is much more safe, for example, than doing swing trades where you are on margin, two to one margin if you're doing swing trades overnight. Of course in a swing trade, you don't have a set timeframe, but again, the benefit of options is a fixed risk that you have on, which is no more than you have the position total of cost. Actually, let me go back to the market here really quickly. So anyways, we rallied today. It is 12, 30 in the afternoon, no more data out the rest of the day. The next data that we'll be reporting will be Thursday morning. We have the unemployment claims every Thursday. So talking about risk and how options work. Well, one of the things that's nice about options is volatility because if you're trading on the right side and momentum comes in and it's volatile, if you've ever traded options, again, if you haven't, you don't know, but if you've ever traded options, the options chain will go like woo, it'll go up. For example, and I'm just talking out loud here and making this up to make a point of what I'm trying to say as an example, let's say we got three and a half hours left in the day.  Let's say this guy here, this is a spy, which by the way, did get down today, okay? Spy closed yesterday at 436.17, open in the morning today, 435.05. Let's say this completely, 100% reverses today. Goes red between now and four o'clock. Could that happen? Yes, it could. There's enough time left in the day we could reverse. So again, what would that mean? We'd have to go under the low, 434.41, and we are currently trading at 436, that's about $2. So if we go $2 down, it's gonna, the options chain inputs, if you wanted to buy a put in the spy would go woo, and it would start to go in your favor. If you took it for example here, if you bought a put here, and I'm just making this up, I didn't send this trade out right now, but I'm making this up. If you bought a 435 put, for example, and then we flip, woo, and we go green to red, fall all the way down into the close. That would create volatility, panic, anxiety, and then again, volatility and the options change, which would be in your favor if in fact you were short, if that scenario would set up, okay? Now if you wanted to go long today, which I would not and I did not, okay? You would have to believe that the market was higher that was gonna continue rally if you bought a call. If you said I don't think it's lower, Melissa, I'm not buying into that, okay? Again, Debra went long today. If you truly believe that the market was higher and had 100% conviction that it was, you would not buy puts, you would buy calls. Now I wouldn't do that, why? Because the market gap down today. Even if I wanted to go long the market, I wouldn't do it today. I would wait. But if you thought it was higher and you wanted to buy a call and you thought the volatility was gonna come into the upside, how would that set up? How would that set up, okay? Because at the end of the day, you'd have to believe, again, you have to get the price up when you're buying and a call is buying. She'd have to say, okay, well if I'm gonna, I would buy and again, you can buy many, many, many, many, many different strikes in the market. So okay, well I'm gonna buy the 437 calls in the spot. Well in order to make money, it's gotta run up through 47 and go pooh! Just like a putt would, but to the downside, this would be the upside, this would be the reverse. You'd have to get a move.  So what would volatility look like to the upside if it would do that? Which I don't think it's going to today between now and four, but if it would, it would have to run up to like 440, 439-ish. Then the options chain would go whew! Like again, if you've never traded options, you don't know what I mean, but if you have and you've watched options chains when a trade is running in your favor. And when I say running, I mean running where the options is priced of what you're in is running in your favor up. Okay, I don't, that the second scenario is the least likely scenario between now and four o'clock. So we either, boom, we close right like this, or we do scenario one or two, and if we close right like this, we'll be no volatility to play in either direction in the market today at all, and the market will just sit here and wait until tomorrow. Which is a possibility, it is the summer, it is going into a holiday week, some people are leaving now, July 4th is in less than a week. July 4th is Tuesday, today is Wednesday, some people are taking a week off, this is their last day of work for a week, going on vacation. So the market may just close looking like this, but falling would be the better play here if we would want volatility in a trade. It hasn't set up that way yet, it could, it might, but I'm letting you know that would be the better play because the play to the upside like I'm saying has very low probability, does that make sense? So when you're trading an option, I'm gonna go over now to talk about BA, when you're trading an option, volatility is your friend. If you get it in the right direction, if it moves against you, then you have the insurance, which the insurance is your risk, you can't lose more than you have at risk, again, which is unlike swing trades or even unlike day trades. Even if I do a day trade and I put a stop in, I could get blown through the stop.  You are guaranteed that you cannot lose more than you have on in the trade at risk when you take an option, that's for sure. So that is again, important, but volatility in your favor is what you want. And one of the reasons I prefer to short is that I like the volatility to the downside more, again, doing puts and options, which is a short because of the fact that panic comes in very, very quickly in a stock or the market when something sells off and falls and that creates a big move fast. Fast is good. Actually, before I talk about this, let's look at this. I just want to look at that for a second. Okay, so let's look at BA. Can everybody see BA? This is a daily chart of BA. So we were talking about, oh, somebody has a question here. Melissa, could that momentum with a gap work anytime during the day? Well, first of all, you're not doing any gap anywhere. Let me make that clear. Again, if you sign up for my newsletter for the options newsletter standalone product, you're getting the newsletters, I'm reading the gaps for you. If you do my class, you will learn how to rate the gaps. You cannot short or buy a put in every gap down and you cannot go long or buy a call in every gap up. But if you're asking me the timing, the timing of this setup, which is I think of what you're asking me, Derek, the timing is I'm looking for him shooting within the time that I call the trade. So for example, because it's a shortened week with the holiday, if I did call a trade right now at 1230 in the afternoon, I would call a July 7th expiration. That means I'm looking for the momentum, Derek, to happen any time between now and July 7th. So you're asking me, could it happen any time in the afternoon? Sure, it can happen any time between now and July 7th. Does that make sense? So again, this is, we're looking for the momentum in an ideal world. It happens right away. Boom! Just like happen with CCO. Take the trade, go to the target, bang, bang, boom and out. I don't even have to worry about the expiration date that went, it was done. Now, Tesla was a different example because the Tesla trades that I called last week were expired this week on Friday. But again, I got out of those when that had the momentum took a day or two or three. So you're asking me if it could happen at 10 o'clock in the morning or three o'clock in the afternoon. Sure, it could happen in any time during the day in the time that I call the trade. Does that make sense? Now, I don't know if you're asking about that because I was talking about the spy. But if you're saying, like I gave you a scenario. I have no idea if that scenario hits. But I did say that that could hit. So if you're like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. This gap down today, yeah. Did I call any new trades in the market today? No. Why? This gap today didn't rate 20 points or more per my system. So I didn't do a spy short here today. But could this do exactly the way that I gave you that scenario? Yes, it could. Yes, it could. And I'm already in some things short and they will start to go then if that occurs between now and four o'clock or they can go tomorrow morning. So again, I didn't enter a new spy put here today. But you could be in one already. Again, part of trading right now, and this is just where 2023 is. I think where the market is. I think where trading is right now is you have to be patient sometimes to get something to go big. Like you could scalp something. That's what Deborah was talking about earlier. Deborah basically scalped two trades today that were long. So they worked with the market as I call them scouts. What I'm looking to do an option, I'm really not looking to scalp it. I'm looking for the momentum. That could happen on the live day or it could happen in a following day after I've already been in the trade in a consecutive gap down or consecutive gap up. In an ideal world, every trade goes the day that I call it.  But that's not reality and not every trade sets up that way. And so that's why you have to give it a week or so. Again, like I said, if I called a trade today or did a trade this afternoon, I would give myself a week and a half. Now let's go back to BA. So BA, this is last week. This was the 16th, then we had the Juneteenth holiday market was closed, boom. So this was Friday. Friday the market closed at 219.99, boom. Open in the morning, 218.89. This was Tuesday because the market was closed on Monday. See the size of the bar. It was fat, it was red, it fell. I called a put, it fell to the target, the target was 212. That was the first target anyways. It went there, broke it, boom, done. You could have been in and out here or you could have get out the next day here. Now I just wanna show you though the power of momentum. I did call the 215 puts on this day. I don't remember what time I sent them out. Anyways, I called the 215 puts. They expired on the 23rd. I did not hold this trade to the 23rd. But that trade went almost $13 through the strike if you held it the very last day. That was in a short week. It was a four day week for the market. But that is the power of trading options with momentum with my system in the gap. And again, talking about the topic for today that you could only focus on options and make money, only focus on options and do this for a living, you can't. Because again, you get normal trades like CCO, you're in and out, boom. And then you get a couple of really big winners like this. And then you're putting together basically a paycheck to pay yourself that month. So I did call a couple of trades in this. Now this backed up the last couple of days. It's falling today. So this is falling. I don't know where it goes tomorrow. I'll be watching it, but this was the sell-off. So we did puts. And as funky as it looks, it did it in the gap. So even though the bars look strange after that first day, the stock price was falling. And again, in reference to options, as long as you're getting it lower and lower and lower and lower, if you're gonna put your up money. And the volatility in this case here in BA did come in the first day. And then came in the second day when it got down because it dropped in here and the low of the bar was 209.38. So this is a tail, but it was actually red. It was actually red on the day. 621, we can look at it. That got stuck in the 15 minute. This was red in the morning. That's the 15 minute went and fell. This was the first day we did it. Again, it's a 15 minute. So it's all about the pick. Derek was asking about, it's all about the pick. If the pick is good, it will go within the time of the option. If the pick's not good, or if the market goes against the pick, even if the pick was good, but the market is something that's totally in reverse of the pick, the trade could not work and it could lose and fail. So again, whether it goes that same exact moment that you take it, or it takes a little bit of time, we all like things to go immediately, but that is just not always the case. Now we are reversing, we are doing one of these scenarios that I just talked about right now. How interesting, how interesting. Let me look up and see what's going on. I'm just gonna take this off. I wanna see if something happened here, newsworthy that we're following. And if you have any questions, let me know. I don't see anything. But is it, so we were just talking. We were just talking here. And I laid out a scenario. I laid out this scenario here. And this is playing out. And this is what I'm very good at doing. Hello, you did this 537, 437 call around 10.15. And it went from 19 cents to 42 cents. Okay, you must have done the daily spy calls then if you paid 19 cents, right? That's not out till next week for 19 cents. And then again around 11.27, 17 cents to 13 cents. And then you're gonna put, okay. Ryan just did a short and a long and a short and a long and a short and a long and a short and a long. I don't trade like that Ryan. So yes, you can capture 10 cents, 15 cents, 20 cents. You absolutely had to have done the daily explorations. If you do a daily exploration in the market that something new, they started that earlier this year. Then you have to pretty much scalp every trade. I do not do that. So that again is scalping, which is what I do. I trade momentum. To me, I think it's a heck of a lot easier to look at something, rank the gap, take the trade and let it play out. If you wanna fast trade again, this would have been a bigger move doing this today short rather than being in, out, in, out, in, out, in, out, in, out. But the other thing, Ryan, that I don't do is I'm not going long something and short something the same day. Can anybody guess why? Derek, Daryld, some of you that have been around with me a while, why would I not go long the spy today and short the spy today? Ryan did it, he made money, I'm happy he was profitable but I don't think that was a good idea. Why won't I go long and short something the same day?  Bob, take a guess, is anybody there? Neil, I think you've been following me for a while even though you haven't signed up yet. Why won't I go long the spy and short the spy in the same day? Or Tesla or BA or anything? Can you think of any possible reason? Daryld says momentum tends to remain in the same direction commitment. Well, Ryan's saying he did make money going long today and he did make money shorting. Again, he did the daily explorations which is why they were so cheap. Because you can't have 100% conviction, momentum flows one way. Well, momentum can go in two directions. We had a big rally yesterday and we sold off the day before. We had a red bar on Monday. We had a green bar Tuesday. The reason that I don't do different positions in different directions in the same stock or the market the same day is because I'm only playing the gap in the direction of the gap if I take a trade. That's number one. And number two is you can have 100% conviction that something's going higher and it's going lower. How do you make money in the market? Well, either you think it's going to fall in which case you short it or buy a put or you think it's going to rally in which case you buy a call or you would go long. So a lot of day traders do what I said earlier is called scalping. They'll take trades back and forth to support a resistance in both directions. You never really get any big profits or any big moves doing that. For example, let's say this does do the scenario I set up a couple of minutes ago and actually I am in a put in the market. I didn't take that put today. I did that before today, a couple of days ago. But the big trade is if the market falls off a planet, it's not scalping it. The big trade is trying to make 100, 200, 300, 400% if the market falls off a planet. So again, trying to get the most bang for your buck is what you want to do with your cash.  That's the problem.  But getting back to trading something in one direction once a day or twice a day, whatever, more than one train, you can't believe that the market's gonna make new highs and is higher and believe that it's also gonna drop and it's lower in the same day or the same week or the same month. So you just like, again, it's like having the bias. The bias, whatever that bias happens to be in, you can believe that the market's higher. Disagree with me with the bias here. Say Melissa, we're gonna run up to 450 by Friday. That's gonna happen. I'm long. That's fine. I can respect that. But to trade at both sides, this is what a lot of traders do though, but then they never really make any real money. And so that's, you're better off just saying, boom. And that's how I do it. Like I'm all in doing this. CCL is gonna fall and I'm shorting it, boom. Or BA or whatever. You can't believe that something's gonna rally and fall at the same time. You don't know the answer. If you say to yourself, uh-uh-uh, you're 50-50. And 50-50 odds are not good enough odds to take a trade and risk money and I don't care if it's $500 or $5,000.  Now the one thing Ryan did is he did play the dailies, the daily expirations, which can be lucrative if you take a trade and get it and get in and out in one day because of the cost of them. They can be very cheap. Again, it's gotta have a move that day, but that is a new thing that they've introduced earlier in the year to allow people to be able to take positions much more cost-effective. I still would prefer to see Ryan do one trade in one direction and believe in it, believe in the trade. Look at how this is doing exactly what I just said. I've been doing this for a long time. That's why people come and learn from me. There you go, it's doing it. This is doing exactly what I just said 15, 20 minutes ago. Darryl, are you in any puts? Darryl's on the newsletter already. Deborah, wow, would it been hard for me to hold a spy put through yesterday? Why? Why? Why? Now, you could have scouted it. If you, I called the trade here. You could have got out with money. But again, that was a scalp. If you want the big move, you wouldn't have got out here. If you held it through here, you were down in the trade, that's true. But what's hard about holding it? You can't lose in one trade. You have to be able to take a risk where you won't let the trade play out. One green bar doesn't mean it's the end of the world. And even if the trade completely loses and goes bust, we'll see. I think my trade's gonna work. But if the trade I took lost, it's one loss. That's it, that's why you can't risk your whole account. You have to be okay with the risk that you're taking. It's not the end of the world if something goes against you. And if you have plenty of time left and you believe in the gap, then you should be okay with that. I don't, we weren't up huge. We were up more than I thought. It didn't make any sense. But if you listened to everything that was going on, if you were watching the news yesterday and you heard everything was going on the news, again, we were down on Monday, I'll just recap. Monday we were down because fears of Russia and Ukraine escalation, and then by Tuesday, everything's fine, everything's great, boop-a-doop-a-do. And then the market rallied and then we had a good couple of reports. We had a few good economic data reports on Tuesday and then the market rallied. It was a one day green bar rally. It wasn't something that should have made you panic out of a trade. Darrell's in it. Well, that's, that's that, well, Darrell, I would be patient here. It's one o'clock. You don't have to make that decision now because Darrell, this could fall all the way down today. We've got three more hours. So I would sit tight, Darrell. But anyways, Deborah brings up a good point. Deborah brings up a perfect point. Again, she said she would have been nervous, nervous about the green bar. But if you have a week left in a trade, you shouldn't be nervous about one green.  That's the whole thing about trading while you have to know what you're doing. Nothing goes straight down all the time. Nothing goes straight up all the time.  Better get out quick, boom. Better reverse it, woo. Because again, you have to believe. You have to believe in your trade. You have to understand what's going on. You still can't take more risk to can afford to lose. You still can't do that. You still have to size yourself accurately. But you have to believe in the trade. This is the exact kind of thing why people get upset about trading the market and then they complain when they lose. And I said, well, why would you complain when you lose? Because you took the trading, you didn't know what you were doing in the first place. If you believe in the gap, which I do when I take a trade, then you follow it through to its natural conclusion, win or lose. But anyways, I was talking to somebody yesterday because I did see, I had a class yesterday and then I looked at the end of the day and I said, oh, that's interesting. Because we did rally more than I thought we would yesterday too. And I said, well, we got to be down today. And then we were, then we were. But I was talking to somebody yesterday and she was like, this is a typical day where this is like a trap for people. Retail traders, because retail traders love to buy dips. So people bought the dip yesterday. Who? Retail traders. I am not following retail traders when I take trades. I am looking for institutional money when I take a trade. So you follow institutional money, you're not gonna get trapped. In my opinion, yesterday you could have gone long as a day trade, could have gotten in and got out, boom. But again, I don't think that was a good setup even yesterday, not after the rally we had for the last month, even if you wanted to go long. There's nothing to tell you that we were gonna continue to go up at this juncture that you would take a trade and go long and do a call, for example, do an option. There's absolutely nothing in this chart that tells you that we're gonna go higher in the next week. Nothing. Now you may say, well, Melissa, okay, but there's nothing here that tells you we're gonna go lower. Well, I disagree with you. But you still couldn't prove to me or convince me there's anything that's gonna show me that we're going higher because there isn't. We're going into a holiday week. We're going into a time where there's tons and tons of stuff going on overseas that could escalate, that could affect the market and will not affect the market in a positive way. And again, the Fed shares talking and people are making statements. And every time he says something, you see volatility in the market. And it's never to the upside. I mean, if you're listening to what he's saying, he's talking about raising rates. Now I don't know if this is just why we reversed here at 1230. I couldn't find anything, but it could be. Anyways, one of the reasons that people lose trading is they don't have 100% conviction in anything that they're doing.  Or they take the trade, they're up, oh my God, I love it, it's fabulous, it's going. And then it starts to back all the way around and then they kill it. Again, then you should have got out when it dropped in the first place, for example, if you were short. Or people take a trade, they say, I love it, I love it, it's gonna go, it looks great, and then it reverses the next day. This is, again, if you're in an option, if you're in an overnight, and then people kill it, and then you test yourself and say, well, you didn't really believe in the trade in the first place, so why did you do it if you killed it? Again, whether you killed it, if it's down to 50% or 60% or whatever, then you didn't believe in the trade. Or you had too much risk on it in trade. I don't know. That's something that each person has to handle themselves. But a lot of people, again, lose money trading because they're doing too many different things in one stock, up and down, and they really don't understand why they're doing the trade. You cannot go long and support everywhere and expect to make money, just like you can't short resistance everywhere and expect to make money. Why? There's a million resistances and a million supports in stocks. How do you know which one's gonna hold? You don't. You don't. And that's one of the reasons why I played the gap. Because in playing that gap, I feel if it rates 20 points or more for me, I have the odds in my favor that it will continue in the direction of the gap. In an ideal world, it goes the same day that I called it and I will get in and get out. And if I'm up enough, but as far as holding something, because I believe in the trade and believe in what I'm doing, I have no problem holding through a trade that's down. And if you did the put that I called on Monday and you killed it yesterday with a loss, and this trade goes on to work, you'll be kicking yourself in the butt, Deborah. Very good to hear my thought process isn't yes, but mental will definitely make more money, yeah.  So you see how human nature, human nature is decisions are made based on fear. Again, this just confirms why I like to short because you can tell this within yourself.   And then you get out. Look at this.  Daryl's getting antsy even though he did it. Daryl, you can always ask me what I think. Daryl did make the money in BA. That one you did good, didn't you? Daryl did BA, Daryl made money in that. Oh, Tessa. Oh no, you did Tessa? Oh, you did the Tessa made money, okay. You didn't do the BA? Okay. There was something else I wanted to say. No, the BA's from last week. The BA's from last week, Daryl. Last week's BA's. I was just gonna say something. I'm trying to think of what I'm trying to convey what I'm trying to say. It's like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna use as an example actually, because this just happened. It's hard to believe this was a week ago. It feels like it was a year ago because no one's talking about this on TV anymore. Remember last week with the submarine? The submarine disaster. It was nonstop news for like three, four days. Now nobody remembers it ever happened. But anyways, those people decided to go in that submarine. It was absolutely not safe. I mean, I don't think anyone would say that it was safe. You know? So the people decided to do it.  This is before the disaster. The company actually, I read shut down. It's closed now. They closed, they were there gone.  But anyways, before that, if somebody said to you, these are the risks, boom, boom, boom and boom, do you want to go in this submarine? Would anyone here have done that knowing the risk even before the accident? Would anyone at all have taken the chance? It's in all seriousness. Like I don't, I couldn't have talked to one person that would have done that. I mean, there was just, there were safety things that they didn't follow. There was just a lot of mistakes that were made there. But people had to sign the waiver and knew the risks. And so you would have had to make a decision to go into that submarine knowing full to well the risks. Would anyone have chosen to do that? This is a serious question. No one's answering me.  Ivan said no. Deborah said no way. They fired an engineer two years ago for reporting flaws. That's right. That was a red flag. That was a red flag. He was trying to do the right thing and they fired him. But either way, the people didn't know that. They didn't disclose that. However, the people still knew. It was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very risky. So when you trade, you need to know the risks. There are risks associated with trading. So you're always weighing the pros versus the cons. So in other words, you can't make money if you don't take risk. They couldn't see the Titanic unless they took risk. They could have gone on a different ship. There were other ones that did this, okay? If they really wanted to see the Titanic, they could have taken a better risk and gone on a different thing that had, different sub that had followed the rules, you know? So the reality is you weighed the pros versus the cons and the risks. The other thing, if you wanted to go on the sub, you say, well, do I really, really, really, really, really? Do I wanna see that Titanic today? Like, for me personally, I have no interest in that kind of thing. I could watch a movie and see it, you know? But like, you'd have to say, well, is this worth the payoff, the payoff, if the people had come back safely, was they would have seen the Titanic and they would have, you know, gotten what they paid for. But the reality is that when you take a trade, Ryan's saying bingo, it's about the risk, when you take a trade, you weigh the pros versus the cons, you have to take risk and you have to say, how badly do I want the money? How much do I want the money? And you should always say that you want the money. I mean, every trade you take, you should always have an expectation with yourself that you'll win. But you have to weigh the pros versus the cons for the risk. So you have to put the odds in your favor because there are more bad trades that you could take in any one given day in a six and a half an hour trading day than there are good trades. There are more bad setups in stocks and the market on any given day than there are. That's why most traders lose. So you have to put the odds in your favor looking for calculated risk, high odds trades, high odds it's gonna go, high odds it could have a big move, high odds it's gonna work in your favor. That may not happen in the timing that you want it to happen as fast as you want it to. Like Deborah's saying she would have been upset and freaked out if she was gonna put a Monday and it ran up on Tuesday, but the trade is time to go. So yes, the trade may work, but it may not work exactly when Deborah wants it to work because that's life and that's the market. And that's the trickiness in the market that sucks people in because everybody when push comes to shove say that they want the money but do they really want the money? Because if they really want the money they'll put the needle to the grindstone and they'll do the work to understand what's happening to price, what's happening to chart and to learn a system or strategy that actually will show you where the price is gonna take you and for me that's the gap, but at the end of the day you have to believe in it because if you don't believe in it then that is not a good trade for you to take that has the high probability that you want and you have to take the risk to make the money anyway. So if you have to take risk and you know you have to take risk take the best risk possible. Again, getting back to the submarine nobody needs to go down to see that Titanic ever more ever again from now until the end of time. That is not a need. That is a want and a desire. Now people need money and they need cash and they want to trade for a living and that is something that they desire to do because they may not like what they do for a living and they may just want extra money and they don't have enough money coming in for the job right now with inflation. But you know again trading is still a desire of something you wanna do but you need to understand what you're doing when you take risk and you need to take trades that have high odds of working and you need to believe that something's gonna go in the direction that you take it and again if you think something's higher and lower then that's not believing, that's 50-50. But you know, you can't get away from the risk factor. You can't get away from that. So you have to take trades that are quality trades that put the odds in your favor and the trickiness of the market is exactly what Deborah pointed out. You're in a trade, you love it, love it, love it. You go to bed at night. That trade was looking good, sitting pretty at four o'clock and we were down actually a little bit Monday night and then we flipped on Tuesday and if that makes you panic then you don't understand the gap, didn't believe in it or had too much risk on. But that's exactly what people get frustrated with the market as traders because that type of chop happens and it happens more than it doesn't and people get sucked in and then they kill a trade with a loss and then it goes on to work. I'm sure that's happened to you if you're trading.  Why did I kill it?  Your thoughts are now in a new bullish market so you can see quick short covering rally and so you scout. Well, here's, I'm just gonna say one more thing and then I'll let everybody go unless anybody has any other questions. I'll make a comment and Deborah's comment about the market. Anybody else wanna ask any questions before I make a comment on Deborah's market comment? It's only 1.15 or 1.12. You have two hours and 45 minutes left in the day so you just gotta play it out. Anyways, Deborah's commenting about the market. Again, we're close to new hives. So let's go back. Beginning of 2022. I'm just looking at the spy right now. High was 479.98. 479, all right, let's be exact. 479 minus we're trading out at 435 so that's $44. So $44, we could go $44 a month in the spy and we could make a new high if we wanted to. So we are closer to making a new high now than we've been at any point in time in the last, you know, 18 months. So again, that is one scenario that could set up. Why? Because we're very close to doing it. If we're gonna do it, and I said this earlier, then we're just gonna do it. We're not gonna mess around here. We're gonna do it and we're gonna go, okay? What's another scenario that could set up, Deborah? What's scenario two? We talked about scenario one and two for today. Let's talk about long term the next six months, scenario one and two. So scenario one is we go out, we make new highs, it happens during earnings season in July of August. Market goes up, flies, goes to 500 in the spy. What's scenario two? Scenario two is, even though Deborah's saying, oh my God, we're in a bullish market, I have to go long every day, scenario two is we don't continue higher and then what? Then what happens, Deborah? We break down and then what? I mean, again, you could list the fundamental reasons why you think we're higher or you could list the fundamental reasons why we're lower. You could make an argument either way. I'm on Newsmax on Friday. I don't know what my topic is yet. But if it's economy or something, you could say, well, if they said to you your topic, you're on Newsmax Friday with me.  And then you have to make a list. What would be the reasons that you think the market's higher, that the recession fears are over, everything's fine, we're having good economic numbers, employment is tight, you could make the list, you could make the case, you could talk against me on Newsmax, I could take one side, you could take another. That's how it works. But again, we're not making trading decisions based on that because absolutely no one knows what the earnings are gonna be for companies out in July or August. Actually, no one really knows for sure if we're gonna go into recession at the end of 2023, 2024. While the Fed may like to think and talk like they know that they're gonna get inflation down to, before they said 2%, now they're saying 3%, before they said a year, then they're saying two years, now they're saying 2025, they don't know, they don't know either, okay? So what we do know, and we can all agree on, and nobody can argue otherwise, is that currently right now, the spy is trading roughly around 435 and change. That's what we know. And we also know the last time the stock market made a brand new Altam high in the spy was the beginning of 2022, which was a long time ago, it was 18 months ago. We also can all agree like Debra was saying that we're not far off the highs now. We're really not. So yeah, we could do it. And you know what, if we're gonna do it, then we're just gonna do it. Boom, that's it, done, we do it. But if we don't do it, again, what's gonna happen?  They're in long positions, they're in calls, they're in swing trains, they're going long every day with the market, rallying and then all of a sudden, they're losing, losing, losing. And then they continue to buy the dip and then we do not go back up to the highs and then people get frustrated that they lose and they're losing. So again, you see why just focusing on one thing, one strategy, one pick, one direction, one trade a day or two, if you want to, is so much easier than scalping, going two directions in one day or even trying to read what the market's doing. Again, we did GIS today, that had nothing to do with the market, we did BA, we did Tesla, they had nothing to do with the market. Again, while I'm playing the market, I focus on specific stocks to try to get the move because again, like I said, I didn't expect the market to rally yesterday. Did it mean that I killed my trade? No, no, and I will win big if that trade works in my favor and I will get paid for the knowledge and for having the conviction to hold it. So again, taking a train, setting your risk, understanding what it's doing, letting it play out, believing in the direction, sticking to one strategy, all these things are good tips because if it was that easy to trade to just say the market's bullish, Debra, let's just go long every day, let's just go long. Let's just go, let's just go long. And I know a lot of people are doing that and they're doing it because we've rallied really for the last month in June and we have rallied since the start of the year. So, you know, there were many days you could have done that but that is not gonna last. Well, today I just did the GIS. I didn't do anything other than this today. Actually, this looks lower, but it might be running out of steam, but it still looks lower. You're welcome, long. Did I hear me right earlier and the call that your default strategy to our options is to day trade them? No, I didn't say that. What do you mean? What do you mean by default? You lost me. I said you can day trade options if you want to because they can go in the same day. If they don't go in the same day and holding them, I think you're confused because we were talking about somebody did options on the daily expiration, Darryl. Maybe that's what you're talking about. There's daily expirations in the spy and the queues. I'm not calling them in the newsletter. I think they're too tight, but they're cheap and very profitable if you get a big move on the day.  You'd have to hold it more than a couple of minutes. Other than that, I'm not sure what your question was really. I think you were confused because I was talking about the daily expirations. Options trades, if you're in and out, you lost me there, Deborah. I didn't get what you were saying. You wait for the momentum to come in, then you get out, then you get out. Deborah, I'm not sure what you meant and does anyone else have any other questions? I think this was a good lecture. I hope some of what I said made sense. Deborah, I didn't understand what you said. Deborah, I still think you should join. You'll learn a lot for sure. Darryl, did I answer your question? Did anybody else have any other questions? Be picky about what you trade. Be picky about what you trade, okay? Again, you want to be selective and that counts. And if you're not picky about what you trade, again, you're gonna lose. So that's the bugaboo. And while some trades may not be good trades that work sometimes, that's the trickery of the market that you could fold into thinking that XYZ is XYZ and it's not. And that's the thing. Again, it's the lure of the market. I should put it that way. It's the lure of the market that makes you think that it's just as easy as going along in a bullish market and it's not. You know what I mean? Great lecture. If anyone has any questions, you can always email me here, okay? And I will see some of you. Oh, another question. Options are through day trade. They can still flag you as a pattern if your balance is under 25K. If, unless you have it set up as a cash account. So again, it depends on how you have this. That is a question for your broker. You can set up a cash. It's set it up as a cash account, Deborah. And you can do that then. So you have to talk to the broker because yes, you can get in and out, but you have to have it set up as an options account that's on cash account. And if you do, then you are okay. And whoever you trade with, you have to talk to them about that. But yes, that's possible. And I do have people doing that. Would the spy, are you talking about today? Are you talking about today, Ivan? Or are you talking about the next week or a couple of days? Ivan's saying is the spy gonna get down to 430 or 425 if it turns down. I don't know if that happens between now and four o'clock. Could it? Sure. It's starting to tank a bit. Again, we talked about the scenario earlier, but Ivan, I saw you come in late. I think you were in the other room, Ivan. So you missed discussion earlier, but I will send you the video on taping this, but we played out the scenario that could happen in the market earlier before we started to fall. I said the least possible scenario for the market in the next couple of days or today is that the market rallies and continues up. So therefore, either we hold, sit in our butts, and don't go anywhere, or we fall. So to answer your question, the answer is yes, unless we just sit in our butts and don't go anywhere. And I think that could happen next week because of the holiday. So I still think we can get action in the market today, Thursday and Friday. I think next week could be dead because the holiday is in the middle of the week. So to answer your question, Ivan, yes. You gotta watch it. Okay, great. Ivan, I'll send you the replay. Any other questions, email me, melissathesockswish.com. If anyone's interested in the class, email me. I started in July 4th special today. I will get that video up too. Please be careful. Very, very careful. All right, have a good day.


What's up you guys, it's Lloyd here with the single guy and today we're going to be talking about assertiveness. Too many people watching this video, too many of my students and something that I struggled with when I was younger. They have a problem with us being assertive, asserting themselves in a social situation. A lot of this has to do with the way we're brought up. We're in school with our parents, we're taught to raise our hand, we're taught to wait in line, we're taught to ask for permission. I mean, we even have to ask to go to the bathroom or in school. Sometimes the teacher says no. How crazy is that? You grow up in this environment where you're basically beaten into the submissive, permission-seeking kind of guy. What do you have to go out in the real world when it comes time to be assertive? You're too scared. In fact, a lot of guys that I talk to, they say that they feel really bad or they feel really ashamed about asking somebody for something or standing up for themselves. Stop feeling bad about standing up for yourselves, guys. Because too many of you, so there's two sides of the spectrum. On the one hand, on the one side, you have the courteous, push-over kind of guy. And then on the other side, you have the disagreeable, ultra-competitive kind of guy. If you're too far on either side, you're not going to be successful in life. But too many of you guys are way too far over here. You have to kind of find in the middle where you lie, where it's reasonable for you. But too many of you are way too far over here. So we've got to push the envelope a little bit and find out where the bar is.   You never find out where the line is, you never find out how far. You can take things because you've never experimented with that sort of stuff. In this video, I'm going to give you kind of a framework, things to do to start being more assertive. I'm going to show you how that looks and how it's going to change your life. So the first thing that I would recommend that you guys start doing is have a code of conduct.   Another rule that I have is if I try and hang out with a girl twice and she doesn't hang out with me those two times, I'm not texting her for a third time. I'm probably going to cut off contact. If she won't hang out with me, then that's fine, but I'm going to move on. These don't have to be your rules, although I think those are two pretty good ones. But you should have some rules of your own, things that you won't put up with. If they're reasonable, there is no reason why you shouldn't want to stand up for yourself in those circumstances. There's no reason to feel bad. The other thing too is that don't be scared to upset a few people.  That's actually killing your ability to cause attraction. We are talking about this thing called breaking rapport on this channel. That's exactly what it is. It's not being scared to have those difficult conversations to stand up for yourself, stand your ground, have a little bit of a disagreement. That's okay. Women actually like that in a guy. You can do that sort of stuff. But if you're never willing to push that barrier, you're never going to find that out. The other thing that I would recommend for you guys is let's say you're out at the bar or something like that. Experiment with ordering people around. I'm serious.    Or can you wash my stuff while I go to the bathroom? Or hey, come here a second. I just want to show you something. Those types of little things, see what you can get people to do. See how people react. And if they don't do something, okay, well, why didn't they do that? Maybe you didn't have enough leverage. Maybe you asked in a way that was too mean. Or maybe you did it in kind of an asshole-ish manner or something like that. Okay, you'll learn to see what happens. And sometimes you might upset somebody. It's okay.  Hey, sorry, didn't mean to upset you and then move on.  Who cares? Okay, there's plenty of people in the world. Not everybody's going to like you. Teaching you guys try and be that type of guy, that bad boy guy that gets those girls because they're able to exemplify those characteristics that you've never exemplified before. The other thing that I'd like to invite you guys to do is handle situations quicker and start making decisions and sticking with them. Say, hey, we're all going to this bar and see how many people follow you. Or let's get off the sidewalk, let's go to the cabana or something like that. Like, just these little things, these little commands, these little decisions, trying to get people to do them, sticking with them and figuring out why they work, why they don't work is a lot of learning about social calibration and being smarter socially. You're going to learn a lot more about people. You're going to learn a lot more about why they won't do something, why they will do something. So what it's going to teach you is it's going to teach you about people's wants and needs. You're going to learn a lot more about what's going on in people's heads. Once you recognize this, you're actually going to be able to get what you want a lot more. So a lot of my students and a lot of times when the guys are out with me, they see me kind of like doing this sort of stuff where I'm ordering girls around, they're kind of like following me or like, how do you get, Lloyd, how do you get these girls to follow you around the bar? How do you get them to buy you a drink or get that other guy to buy you guys a drink? How do they get them to let you into that club for free? Well, I did it because I have a good understanding about what women's wants and needs are. And so I'm able to ask in a way that is charismatic, smooth, but also assertive at the same time. And so people are more likely to do what you want if you know it's going to benefit them too. And I'm always conscious of this sort of stuff. So I'm thinking about what's going through her head as I'm talking to her a lot of times. And sometimes if we're in a crowded area, it's easier to just leave. It's better for the both of us. Sometimes if we're just, you know, around board, like I can make it a game and I can make it say, hey, I bet you can't get that guy to buy us a drink or something like that. Now it's a fun game for the both of us. So by my innate understanding of people's feelings, thoughts, I'm able to get people to do what I want a lot more. Once you start experimenting with this, like ordering people around, the temptation for a lot of guys to spend, and this is kind of what happened to me, is that you try and be that ultra alpha guy all the time and you don't compromise. But one of the characteristics of an assertive and calm leader is he's flexible. So if things don't go exactly the way that you want, it's fine. Work something out. So let's say you want a girl to come to, I don't know, another bar with you or something like that. And she's like, oh, but I got to hang out with Sally.  We're not going at all. Just bring Sally with you in the ditcher later. Like it's fine. You don't have to be that kind of guy that's like a stickler for everything because you're trying to be that ultra alpha dominant guy. Because that guy doesn't have a lot of success either. And what's related to this too is don't get too emotional. If you're trying to be assertive and people aren't listening to you, the worst thing that you can do is get really flustered. One of the things that used to really trigger me is if a girl was, if she would be like, oh, or she would say that. Now, when I was telling a story or to me in general, I would get really frustrated.  Okay. Once you start acting out, once you start yelling at people and losing your cool, you basically just lost all your social power. So if you keep your cool in a calm, collected manner, you can get people to do a lot more stuff and you can be a lot more assertive and stand up for yourself in a calm, smooth, charismatic way. What I mean charismatic and I mean smooth, I mean, you're going to start asking for things, but you're going to start asking for them probably in the wrong way at the beginning. But then you're going to start to realize, okay, there's a better way to ask for things. So if you, like for the example of getting a girl to buy me a drink or something like that, if I just said, hey, buy me a drink and threw the money at her, okay, that would be a horrible way to ask that question. But if I handed her the money very gently, I said, hey, I'm going to go to the bathroom. If you could get me a this, this, this, okay, that'd be really great. I'll see you in a second. That's a lot better way of asking than just being dismissive. The other way was actually pretty compassionate and, you know, it was a lot more charismatic than the first way. So you're going to get better about being able to ask for things in a certain way. Being nice in this category means they're able to ask for things in a way that actually makes the person feel good about doing it. One way that you guys can start being more assertive without feeling like you're, so I know a lot of guys feel bad about doing this sort of stuff. So one of the things that you can do to take the pressure off you is to use certain phrases like all, you know, my rules are or I have a policy or something like that. So an example here is if a girl walks up to you and is like, hey, buy me a drink, which by the way, if a girl ever, the first things out of her mouth is buy me a drink. You should never buy her a drink. So if she walks up and says that, I'll say like, oh, well, I have a policy. I can't buy girls drinks unless I've been talking for a little bit or something like that. Okay, that takes a little bit of the ownership off you. And it's like, well, it's the policy. Sorry, it's not me, even though you were the one who came up with that in the first place. So that's something that you can use to help out with this as well. The other thing that's going to help too is your vocal tonality and the way that you talk. So if you, a deeper voice is a little bit more commanding and women respond a little more to that. If you have a really deep voice, the way you ask for stuff is you actually got to be a little nicer than what you asked for it, but it does work a little bit better. So you can do vocal tonality exercises to get your voice a little bit deeper. Also too, don't ask for things really unclearly and speak super quickly. I know I speak really fast on this channel, but I actually speak a lot slower when I'm out, especially if the music's loud. And that helps make it sound a little more calm, collected, and more commanding. Hopefully from what you're seeing from this is how to be assertive in a reasonable way. That kind of guy is really attractive. But if you go onto the other side where you're asking for things in a way that's just like way too emotional or way too aggressive, that is not going to work for women. So again, you have to find out where you lie on this line.  And you're going to find a medium in between where you're standing up for yourself, getting what you want, but also making people feel good while they do it and being kind and compassionate to others. So find that balance, you guys. Don't be scared to upset people. Again, if you find yourself upsetting people consistently, okay, ask yourself, why am I doing this? This is something that I can change. But if you're not, then I would invite you to do it and see where the line is. Because if you don't cross the line, you'll never know where it is really. So thanks a lot, you guys. If you made it to the end, consider subscribing. I come up with videos like this every single week. If you're interested in my weekly one-on-one mentorship program, shoot me an email with us singleguy2017 at dmo.com. If you have any questions, put them in the comment section below. Thanks a lot. Good luck out there, you guys.


here on Hope Today. I'm Anna and I'm here with Sydney and Sydney. You have a wonderful guest that's joining us in a few minutes. Tell us about her. We are. We're going to talk about a really important topic today. You know, according to the U.S. Census, one in four children live without a father in the home. The statistics are staggering and because of the lack of father figures is so prevalent in our society, it's leaving many men and women with deep spiritual wounds. And our guest today, Kia Stevens, is going to share her journey of growing up without her dad and share biblical insight on how you can overcome father wounds, too. You know, and I think this is such an important conversation to discuss and talk about, especially in the body of Christ, because so many people are dealing with these things and don't really understand and realize how that trauma kind of surface when it comes into their lives. Right. Absolutely. You know, I've done a little bit of research myself just on the significance of the primary parents and the impact that they have on the emotional well being of their children. And when one of those relationships between parent and child is broken, it has such an incredible far reaching impact on that child as they grow up, as they get into other relationships and they see how it can kind of trickle into other areas of their lives. And but today, you know, we always love to bring you hope because there is hope. No matter what you've gone through in your past, no wonder no matter what the present is dealing you right now, there is always hope because we have the living hope of Jesus Christ. Yes, we do. And we just like hope and pray that today that as you're watching this and maybe it'll be for you, you can totally relate because, you know, you didn't have a father in the home, but we just truly believe that God is moving in the midst of it, that he is bringing families together. So we hope that you will be inspired and encouraged by this conversation today and any point of the conversation that you want to connect with one of our prayer partners. You know that we are always here for you. So you can give us a call at<PHONE_NUMBER>. Well, Kia Stevens is the founder of Intrusted Woman, a group created to equip Christian women who are communicators of color. She's also a writer and speaker who's been featured on Proverbs 31 Ministries and Crosswalk and among many others. In her book, Overcoming Father Wounds, Kia shares practical biblical insight to help women battling insecurity, low self-esteem and trouble with connecting with God as a heavenly father. Kia, we are so glad that you are joining us today. I'm honored to be here. Hi, Anna. Hi, Sydney. Well, it's such a joy to have you with us today. And Kia, can as we're like getting into this conversation, can you just share a little bit about your background and talk to us about your upbringing as a girl growing up? Sure. Well, my parents got a divorce when I was three. And subsequently, I have very few memories of spending time with my father. I do have recollection of court ordered visitations, one visitation at his home, one time where he bought a bike for me and all the other memories of my father growing up are about gifts that he left on the front porch of my grandparents' home. So my dad was he missed most everything in my adolescent and growing up. You know, Kia, I think a lot of people can relate to that where it's like there's such a disconnect where you want your father to be in your life, but you don't see him. He's not around. He's only you only have those little sprinkle of memories. And can you talk to us about, you know, because you really dig in into your book of when you started to see that these wounds that the lack of your father being in your life really began to surface in your life. Sure. You know, I was in college. It was my freshman year in college. And I remember being in the dorm room of a friend and she motioned to a bookshelf that she had made. And she said these words, I made that bookshelf with my dad. And for me, it was essentially like someone took the bandage and ripped it off of the wounds that were just just beneath the surface that I hadn't given thought to. And so in that moment, I realized I was not okay. I wanted what she had. I wanted a relationship with my father. And you know, Kia, something else I remember like you shared in your book, when you talked about even meeting your husband and how that surface in the beginning of your relationship, can you share that as well? Sure, you know, I remember being in a church service and the minister was describing a pickup line he might have for a woman. And he said, you know, do you have father wounds? And the imaginary woman says, no, I don't have father wounds. And he says, Oh, well, I'm not interested in you. I'm looking for a woman that walks into this relationship roaring angry and blamed me for everything she's mad at her father about. And I was sitting in the balcony thinking, Whoa, no one ever told me this. I didn't get this message in marital counseling. No one told me in my all girls college, you know, it never came up when I was growing up at home or in church, I grew up in the church. And so one of the things I began to discover is that if you have unaddressed father wounds, it has the potential to impact your marriage. You can redirect anger towards your father towards your spouse. You can begin to try and get needs that went unmet in your childhood from your spouse. And spouses are not meant to meet our needs in that way. They are a resource that God might use. But God is our source. And that was something I had to learn in marriage. Okay, I think a lot of women can relate to that like dealing with not having a father and then seeing these issues arise in your marriage. And can you just take us through your journey of healing, how God walked you through like uncovering and unearthing this deep rooted pain. Can you talk to us about that? Sure. And I don't want to give the impression that my journey was linear. By any means, it was very spider web ish, if I can make that a word. But some of the practical things that I did was I saw a counselor, a licensed professional Christian counselor. I also walked through a forgiveness letter. I remember being in one of my counseling sessions and she said, Have you written a forgiveness letter to your father? And I was thinking, I don't know why I would need to write a letter to my father. He wasn't there. So there isn't anything I need to forgive. And I took her up on her advice. And I wrote this forgiveness letter, I had a template and there's a template inside of my book as well. And it was very difficult for me to complete when I got to the part where I say what the actions of my father directly and indirectly impact how it impacted my life. It was very difficult for me to get through in one sitting. When I recounted how I wanted him there for the father daughter dances, I wanted him there to interrogate dates. I wanted him there to sit on the couch and watch football. I wanted him there for the first and last days of school. When I began to enumerate the ways in which I wanted my father's presence in my life, I found it difficult to get through that. But writing that letter brought me so much healing. And then I also did another counseling technique, which is called the empty chair where you put an empty chair in front of you and you sit in the chair on the other side and you read the letter to that empty chairs if your father was there. I never gave the letter to my father, but I got so much healing with those two, those two counseling tools. In addition to that, just prayer, praying for my father. And when you pray for your father or pray for your offender, it's difficult to be bitter and angry at the same time. The Holy Spirit does something in our hearts. He uproots that bitterness and he uproots that anger. And he brings about a complete transformation in our heart when we commit to choose to pray for our father. In addition to that, I also talk deeply about forgiveness in terms of just what forgiveness is and it is not. Forgiveness is not dismissing the nine justifying, faking or masking. Forgiveness is a relinquishing of our right to hold another person responsible for the wrong that they have done to us. And I spend a lot of time working on forgiveness and what we got realized is that forgiveness is for you. That was something I had to embrace. I had to realize that forgiveness is both practical. It's a decision. It's a choice that we can make or not make, but then it's also supernatural. So once we consciously as an act of our will say we're going to forgive our father, then we ask God to come in and help our mind and our heart to follow suit. Forgiveness truly is freedom for the one who forgives. So Kia, where is your relationship with your father today? Sure. At the end of my book in chapter nine, I talk about going to traveling 800 miles to go and see my father because my publisher wanted me to get permission from my dad to make sure everything that I included in the book was OK. And actually, the book is probably 99.9 percent about me and 1 percent about my father. But I remember picking my dad up, driving to a Mexican restaurant, pulling out my computer and sitting at the table across from some chips and salsa and reading to him the contents of the book that pertain to to him. And I would pause and say, dad, are you OK with that? Dad, are you OK with that? And he said yes. But when I got to that final section of the book that I read to him, I look up and my dad has tears in his eyes.  And that was really a moment for me for not because I needed to hear those words that might that my dad said to me I had already gotten what I needed from God. But because in that moment there was no bitterness, there was no anger, there was no I owe you blank check that I was holding trying to give to my father so that he could pay back for me everything that I missed. In that moment, what I had in my heart was forgiveness and love that I had already received from my Heavenly Father. And so I think that's one of the greatest miracles in our story. We do have a relationship now. It's not perfect, but it is a tangible example of the goodness of God in my life. You know, Kia, that's just so beautiful just to see about that reconciliation that happened in this way that like God is using what you're writing in your gift to bring that relationship. It's not it's not like perfect. I know relationships, they can be they go through ups and downs, but it's so beautiful that God allows you to get to that point. I just want to ask you, Kia, from that moment, because you said it was a miracle, how did it change you moving forward? Sure, it's definitely made me more compassionate. It's definitely caused me to realize that my parents are people. You know, when we grow up as children, we look at our parents and they're somehow larger than life. They somehow should never make mistakes. They somehow should always be perfect. And the reality is our parents are flawed just like we are. And they need to come to the foot of the cross in need of grace and mercy and clinging to God for substance to just live out this life. And so I have a greater grace that I offer to my parents and that I offer to others because I have been able to see how we all need God. We all need God that Jesus died for me. And he died for my father too. And I think that's an awareness I just take it to my every day. Kia, for someone watching today, how would they start to look inward and decide if there possibly is a father wound? Like what are the behaviors that they might be exhibit exhibiting right now? Sure. And I find that a lot of people don't know what a father wound is. A father wound is synonymous with father absenteeism. So this could occur for a myriad of reasons by way of divorce, abandonment, abuse, incarceration, drug addiction, alcoholism and affair, premature death or physically present, but an emotionally absent father. And it's been my experience that often women see the indicators in their relationships with the opposite sex. They might see the indicators in the way that they in the messages that they communicate to themselves in their mind. Sometimes we believe lies that are rooted in our survival. For example, I am not loved. I am not worthy. My my value is rooted in my anatomy or my value is rooted in my performance. All of those things are indicators that we have a root that could be directly correlated to the relationship or the lack thereof that we had with our father. In addition to that, we can also see our woundedness play out in the way that we mother our children.  And I had over 900 survey respondents, and many of them said that they had difficulties in their relationships with the opposite sex. They had relationship had difficulty relating to God as their heavenly father. They could get with Jesus, maybe the Holy Spirit, but not God, their heavenly father. And many of them also shared that their father had father wounds, their mother had father wounds, and now their children had father wounds. So those are just a couple of indicators that women might see. But certainly this conversation, I said a lot of things. And if you're listening to this conversation and you're saying, oh, that kind of bothers me or oh, I feel catapulted to that time when I was three or that time when I was 17 or that time when I was 18. And I'm remembering something that my father said or did not say or did or did not did did not do. That is also an indicator that you might in fact have father wounds. That's like really powerful. We just want to encourage you if you're just listening and you're responding to what Kia says, give us the call in our prayer line at<PHONE_NUMBER>. And can you just hit on something that I think is so paramount that a lot of people have a problem when they don't have a father in their life, understanding as God, the father. So can you talk to us for a moment, how God has helped you to see him in a different light as father? Yeah, you know, years ago, I discovered this quote in the Washington Times that says its sociologists believe it's common for people to perceive that God is like their father or the fatherly figures in their life. And then subsequently, a couple of years later, I went through some extensive counseling at my church, where we actually unpacked the type of fathers that an individual could have. You could have a distant father or a passive father or a dominant father, an abusive father. And all of those fathers could lend us to viewing God in that way. It could mar our vision of God, the heavenly father, or skew our perspective of who God is. And for me, I had to begin to look at the attributes of God in the pages of scripture. I had to begin to look at how God, how Jesus, because the word of God says, if you have seen me, Jesus said that if you've seen me, then you've also seen the father. And so I had to begin to look at how Jesus engaged with women specifically in the word of God. And when we look at the woman with the issue of blood, who did all she could, she had gone to several doctors and she had suffered with this issue of blood for 12 long years. And she finally mustered the courage and the strength to go through this potentially judgmental crowd, just so she could touch the hymn of Jesus' garment. She touches his garment, she gets her healing. And then she, then Jesus, who is omniscient and sovereign, and he knows everything. He's all powerful. He says, who touched me? And, you know, I find it really hard to believe that Jesus did not know who touched him. I believe that he asked that question for the benefit of the woman. And then when she came into the forefront, she was visible to everyone. He said, daughter, you are healed. He called her daughter. An intimate term. He didn't call her unnamed woman. He did not say unclean woman. He called her daughter. And I believe that that is how God engages with his daughters today. In a compassionate, in a tender, in a loving, in an attentive way. He says, I see you. I love you. I've chosen you. You have worth. You have value. You are mine. I love it that he calls us a daughter. And you have a campaign that is really, you're doing right now for daughters that have been wounded in her. Can you talk to us about hope for her campaign? Can you tell us about that? Sure. I've partnered with Wellspring Living. That is a nonprofit here in the Atlanta Metro area that services victims of sex trafficking by providing them with programs and residential living assistance. And what I wanted to do was to provide them with a book for free, Overcoming Father Runes, because, you know, a lot of women who find themselves in sex trafficking have found themselves there because they were preyed upon by father figures or by men who post as love interest. And so to date, we have given 47 books. I just received a large donation and I'll be sending over some more books. My goal is to get 150. But if there are individuals who would like to partner with me to provide this free resource to to women in the Wellspring Living residential programs, you can simply go to www.KiaStevens.com forward slash books and there's a link to the Hope for Her campaign there. Or you can go directly to HopeForHerCampaign.com. Kia, thank you so much for everything that you shared today, opening up your story and providing hope for those who've lived without a father and we just know so many people's lives have been touched and blessed today. Her book is called Overcoming Father Wounds, Exchanging Your Pain for God's Perfect Love. Kia, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you. And we will be right back after this and it has a special message for you and we want to speak to your heart. Pray for you. We'll be right back. Cornerstone Television exists to spread the good news through Bible based programs and a fully staffed prayer line. Through CTVN, lies are saved. Hearts, minds and bodies are healed and Jesus is lifted high. We can't do this work without you. Would you consider sending a gift this month to keep the gospel moving forward with power? When you give, we'll send you listen, love, repeat, which presents scriptural examples of those who lived alert, including Jesus, who noticed those who least expected to be seen, gives creative ideas for showing love to friends and family, suggests practical ways to reach out to the lonely, marginalized outcasts, helps you comfort the grieving and so much more. Ask for your copy of listen, love, repeat when you give today. Call<PHONE_NUMBER> or go to ctvn.org slash donate. Thank you for your generosity. Hope happens here.  You know that we always love to bring you the word of God because it is truth and power for our lives. Our scripture today comes from 1 John 3 1 just the beginning and it says this, see what great love the father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God. I love this scripture so much because that word lavished is so abundant. It is so overflowing and unstoppable. And today if you listen to the conversation with Kia, we're talking about our earthly father wounds but my prayer for you today, our prayer is that you would grasp the love of your heavenly father because his love is so perfect. And you, my friend, he delights in you. Check out Zephaniah 3 17. It talks about your God. He is with you. He is for you. He sings over you. He delights in you. What a perfect love of God. Know that nothing can separate you from the love of God.   He's given you a unique purpose with gifts and talents. And for those of us who have been on this earth, maybe just even a little bit of time, it doesn't take long for the things of this world to start to try to tear us down. But the beautiful thing about the salvation of your heavenly Father is that salvation has the power to reverse what has been done to you and make you into this new creation so that you can have full, abundant, whole life and a walk with joy. If you've never accepted Jesus as your Savior, that's how God sent rescue for you through Jesus, where Jesus left heaven and came down to earth as a human. And he climbed up on that cross and he died for you.  And then Jesus rose back up victorious. And for those of us who call him Lord and Savior, we too rise back up victorious. So today, today is your day to accept the love of God and of Jesus Christ.  Tell him how much you need him. Thank him for being a Lord and Savior of your life. Ask him to forgive you for anything in your past and to heal you and make you whole again. And then friend, you rise back up and you praise the Lord because today is the day of your salvation. Today is the day that you begin to apply that salvation and walk in the wholeness and fullness of Jesus Christ. Who we, that is so good, Anna, because that is everything that is so amazing that Jesus paid it all. We were the pearls of great price and he laid down his life for us so that we could come and know the heavenly Father. There is no other religion, I've studied them, that have a God that says heavenly Father. What a beautiful opportunity that we have to be with the heavenly Father. You know, one thing I think about Anna, when I was in my mid-20s, I had this amazing encounter with the love of God. It's not just something we say, it's not just something we express, but do you understand that God wants to meet you right where you are? And I remember I was on this church floor, I was at Petron and National Ministries and I'll never forget it, I was on the ground and I couldn't get up because of the glory of God, but I felt the love of the Father and I knew that he loved me. And maybe today you don't know what that love feels like because of your life and because maybe your father wasn't around or your mother wasn't around, but can we just share with you today that God saw everything that you walked through, he saw your pain, he saw your tears, he saw everything that you cried. And right now, he wants to step right in to your living room, your bedroom, maybe you're watching from a jail cell, maybe you're watching from a homeless shelter wherever you are today, allow the heavenly Father to just step in and love on you today.  To be still and know that he is God and that he loves you with an everlasting love. And that is our greatest hope for you today. You see this is we're not talking about a religion, we're talking about a relationship and that's what it's been about all along. So if that's you today, we wanna connect with you, we wanna hear for you and we wanna be there for you. So give us the call or prayer line at<PHONE_NUMBER>. Yeah, it's the love of God. I think that so many, and even we have gone through the times in our life where we run after other things to fulfill us. Like we know there's this emptiness, we know that there's something more and so we chase after it and so often it just leaves us empty.  We are not whole until we have that relationship with him. And the thing is, is that maybe you're just wondering, like is this even legit? Like they sound like super spiritual there. I don't even know if this is true or not. Well, give it a try. I mean, what else have you tried? And it's always led you to a dead end. I mean, we can assure you because we've experienced it. We know it's true because we stand firm on the word of God, which has lasted since the beginning of time. Give it a try because when you draw near to God, the Bible says that he draws near to you. Like friend, he's been pursuing you since you were born. He is waiting for you today to come near to his heart because his heart beats for you. I love that his heart beats for you. He wants to make your heart his home. That's what he's after. It's as simple as that. It's not hard. It's not tough. It's the most beautiful thing in the world.  It means to give. Think about that. It means to give. And the greatest love that God ever displayed was giving his son, his one and only son, Jesus, for you and for me. Just sit on that for a second. God is so good. And he loves you so much. And we love you so much. And we're so glad that you joined us for this very special program where we could just share about the love of the Father that can only come when you accept Jesus. Have a great day. We love you.


Welcome back to Tennis Talk, my name's Cam Williams and we have confirmation from the USTA that Novak Djokovic will not be able to come into America, therefore not able to play at the US Open. Let's go over a read of the statement that they bought out only a couple of hours ago. This is what the USTA had to say in a statement. US Open does not have a vaccination mandate in place for players, but it will respect the US government's position regarding travel into the country for unvaccinated non-US citizens. Heard the Grand Slam rulebook, all eligible players are automatically entered into the men's and women's main draw based on ranking 42 days prior to the first Monday of the event. There you have it, it's a similar situation to what we saw in Australia where Djokovic was allowed to play the Australian Open, but he just couldn't get into the country, which is always going to be a problem of course. You can't get through the borders, how are you going to get to the court? So that is where that's where the USTA stand. They're like, hey, we want him to play, but the US government won't let him in and we're going to respect that, that they are the rules and unfortunately he can't be in there. That's why he's on the entry list. If you saw our video for that, he's on the entry list for that and a lot of people ask some questions, why is he on the entry list? If he's not at the tournament by a certain time, he won't be in the draw. As we saw it in Indian Wells, remember in March we saw him in the draw. He actually got seated in the draw and then entered with the draw last minute because he couldn't get into America. Same situation for Canada. He will be on the Canadian Open draw or at least on the entry list, but he won't be able to play that either because he can't get into Canada. The same way he can't get into America, but let me know down in the comments below. What do you think about the whole Djokovic situation? Do you feel bad for him? Do you think he should be allowed to play? So know about Djokovic, unable to play the US Open because he can't get into the country unless the rules change.