Cast is now starting. All attendees are in listen only mode. Hello everyone. Welcome. Thank you for joining. This is Jason Ulrich with Top Shelf Traders. It's great to have everyone here. We've got a really good size group joining us. It's just one minute after the noon hour on the east coast. We've still got some folks filtering into the room. If you could do me a favor and just throw a quick yes and yes just to confirm that you can hear my voice okay and that you can see Melissa's screen. Okay. That would be great. Thank you. Thanks Robert. Thanks Phillip. Awesome. Perfect. We still have a few folks filtering in the room. Outstanding. We are thrilled to have Melissa Armo here with us today. Ms. Armo if you have heard her name before that is not a coincidence at all. She's the owner of Stock Swoosh. She's also a regular stock analyst on Fox News and her topic that she has for us today is very appealing. Something that a lot of our traders and readers and followers are looking for one basic strategy. Take 30 minutes a day and earn $20,000 a month with one strategy. It doesn't get much more appealing than that. I referenced from time to time our survey that we had done and we went out to our 250,000 plus traders. I think it's clearing 300,000 by the end of the year and we asked what they were looking for and among the topics was just a basic strategy that they can apply. They all had or the better majority of them seem to have limited time. So here we're going to talk about learning to trade. Day trade starts with momentum, how to find that momentum and why shorting can be extremely profitable for you as a trader. So looking at momentum as an overall tool or topic. Now as I mentioned before Melissa Armo has been the owner of Stock Swoosh and the contributor for Fox News but one of the things that I absolutely love about her background is she came from the mortgage business and she caved that up to pursue her love of trading. It's something I can personally relate to having spent a career doing something and then moving into trading. So very excited to have you Melissa. Thank you for joining us. We've got a full group here in a full room so I'll man the questions box for you. And real quickly before I turn it over we'll be sure to answer the questions that come up in the questions box. I'll man the questions box and of course this is being recorded for everyone. So sorry about that Melissa. I'll turn it over to you. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here today. Welcome everyone. And yes my name is Melissa Armo and I own my own company called the Stock Swoosh. I've been trading now for almost 10 years. I started out in 2008 so it's been a long time. I actually don't remember even the career before I had when I was doing mortgages what it felt like to work so many hours. One of the benefits of day trading is that even if you trade all day your day has done it for a clock. Now we're going to talk today specifically about the strategy that I focus on the time of the day that I trade which is in the morning. So I'm looking at between 9 30 and 10 a.m eastern time and that's not to say that you can't do trade sometimes and hold them later. In fact we will talk about one today that I did last week that I did hold if something's still going you can hold it. But I think it's very important to focus on that time of the day at least for nothing else the entry. All right so we're going to go through and we're going to talk today and we're also going to talk about how you can make 20 grand a month and really the idea of that is that you would be able to do this for a living. There's a lot of people that make attempts at day trading. I think one of the challenges that people have with it is that they're not focused enough so that's what we're going to talk about today as well. Focusing on one strategy so that you can get good at it because you know in order to make a career out of this you have to be extremely good at one strategy to do it and that's and then you can do other ones but you got to get good at one first and be profitable at that one first and I think it's about the consistency. So if you're interested in more information you can call me 9293200 gap or email me at melissathestockswush.com and you can watch me on Fox and Fox Business Network. So how can you make $20,000 a month in the market? Well you have to have a system okay and you have to use it daily and you can't deviate from it. So how do you make money in the market consistently? You have to have more winners than losers this sounds like common sense but the reality is that many people don't focus enough on one thing and they're all over the place using different strategies and different systems all the time any given day and so then the results reflect that because they may do strategy one two and three between Monday and Friday and so they may have a certain percentage of win ratio with one strategy strategy one different one with strategy two different one with strategy three well then your results are going to reflect that my strategy my system has about an 80% win ratio so that means if you figure 10 trades two are going to be losers eight are going to be winners and I do use stops so when we go over the trades today you're going to see where I have stops I use limit order stops and that means that I have a fixed risk when I take a trade and if you want to be consistent then you have to have a fixed risk you have to use a stop or know that you're going to kill a trade and when I say a hard stop like I said it's a limit order because you know people say well I'll get out if it goes here well will you you know sometimes and the market has been quite volatile lately if you don't have a stop in you may miss your exit to take it out manually so having a stop really protects you it's like the insurance and at the end of the webinar today we're going to go over the trades called in their trading room from October November which was really good results now it was earning season in October November but I just want to show you here how you can make way more than 20 grand a month trading all right so you can make 30 grand a month trading and November actually I was closed for the for the Thanksgiving week so there wasn't even a full month of trading so really nice results in the room if you decide you want to come to learn with me and take all of my calls daily now let's get back into what we're talking about as far as the time of the day the morning into the open again I trade the US stock market so I'm looking at that 9 30 time what happens between 9 30 and 10 a.m all right so eastern standard time the market opens you have the pre-market which opens very early but most traders are focused that are day traders on trades after 10 but what I focus on is trades between 9 30 and 10 because I'm looking for what institutions are doing into the open so say for example like a fun a hedge fund they may see an earnings on a stock could be any stock all right amazon google whatever and then they decide they want to buy or sell that stock into the open of the day so they're not going to sit around and wait until 10 o'clock to take a big position and so what I look to do is determine before the open before 9 30 in the pre-market or you could do it in the post-market at night but I usually do it in the pre-market and I'm predicting where the stocks that are gapping are going to go on the day after the open after 9 30 and I'm looking to focus mostly in shorts but I do look at long so we'll talk about long too so I'm looking to go with that institutional money in the gap and we're going to explain today what a gap is too so you can make this kind of money in the market but you have to have a system that you follow daily and you've got to get good at it and a lot of people say well you know I've been trading for 20 years Melissa 15 years 10 years whatever like I said I've been only trading for 10 years which actually is a small amount of time if you look at a lot of traders that I've talked to but I'm really good at what I do because I focus only on reading the gap and so anyone from any walk of life no matter what your experience is trading you have the opportunity to get good at something to make this kind of money if you really hone it down and focus and that also means not deviating so if I look at something and I think it's a short all right and if I take a stop in it then that's it I take the stop I don't flip it and go long because when I say focus I mean I'm really really focusing and I don't deviate from that and the way that I look at goals and this is you know this could be for anything any goal you have in life particularly even you know monetary goals I think it's good to break it down with the numbers but chunk it out look at everything as a process so if you want to make 20 grand a month what's your goal well five thousand a week a thousand a day but again you have to look at it in the bigger picture because maybe one day you won't trade so then you say well I didn't make my thousand dollar goal today but there wasn't any good gaps but tomorrow you might might make 2000 you might make 3000 okay so you really do have to look at it in the bigger picture with trading now if you want to hit these numbers you should know your average risk should be around a thousand dollars a trade you could risk less if you if you can't afford a thousand and then guess what you will work it up you will have a goal you will have a process to reach that goal so you will grow your account to get to the point where you can risk a thousand dollars a trade if you want to achieve this goal it again everyone comes from a different placement and you have to take the money that you have and grow it whether that is a small account or a big account you have to work with what you got because you're not going to change with what you got unless you go out and you do some other kind of job or work full time or part time or do something outside of trading if you want to wait until you start with a larger account I don't think it's necessary I think the learning process is part of all of this and many many people don't understand that you don't have to wait until you have a huge amount of money to date trade there are other options out there you can go and talk to many many different kind of brokers there are proprietary day trading firms out there that will give you 10 to 1 leverage 20 to 1 leverage all right so think about that when you're looking at your goals chunk it out start where you have looked ability or account but in order to hit these numbers you want to be risking about a thousand dollars per trade okay and as I said earlier I use hard stops so time of the day why is that time of the day important because momentum momentum comes into a stock into the open either up or down in gaps so I'm looking for the follow through so if a stock gaps up I'm looking for buying to come into the open if a stock gaps down I'm looking for shorting or selling to come into the open now if I don't see any momentum coming into the open between 9 30 and 10 it doesn't mean I'm not going to do the trade but I will tell you if the trade isn't set up by 10 o'clock 10 a.m. then I'm probably not doing the trade and I typically want to see a lot of momentum in that first 15 minutes of the morning so between 9 30 and 9 45 now for those of you that don't know what a gap is we're going to go over that right here this is a daily chart it's a chart of the spy spy has had a huge move this year ever since the election ever since really ever since Trump got elected from November 2016 you could have bought the spy in November or any of the ATFs QQQs Dia you could have bought any of them right after the election morning after the election and been up ever since for 13 months straight the market has rallied and you almost could have bought every bullish gap not everyone but almost okay now there were two particular ones that were very important that happened recently but I just want to go over here again what a gap is and again you can do bullish gaps or bearish gaps but the spy had a lot of bullish gaps which means it's been rallying so this is a gap a gap is when a stock closes at four o'clock Eastern time it opens the next morning at different price and so here the spy closed here at one price take it across and go over it's around 248 ish boom gapped up in the morning around 249 open higher so it closed at one price at four open at a different price at 930 in the morning and between here and here something happened it got bought spy got bought so between four o'clock and post market trading and the pre-market trading in the morning there was buying that came in so you say well what am I going to do with that one Melissa well I developed a system to to rate it in the pre-market or the post market to determine if this is going to move higher or lower all right and like I said I never flipped it but this was a good long and actually this was back in September this is September of 2017 if you went along this bullish gap in the spy again take it across high was 248 we ran up and the previous high that we've made which was not today was a couple days ago I think it was Friday Thursday oh yeah it was Thursday was up around 266 so if you had bought this gap just September October November just in a three month period look at what a nice move this was now this is if you did a swinging trade or an option trade but if you had day traded this here guess what it worked okay so that's a gap up this is a gap down so here we have the spy closed here boom open lower so it closed here one number open at a lower number so it gapped down and actually you could have shorted this is a day trade but if you did it as an overnight it never had the follow-through but if it's a day trade here you could have shorted this gap down and it sold off okay so every day I'm looking for gaps and I like to focus on the shorts but the spy has not been a short um it has been a long all right so that is what I'm looking at so I'm really I'm a chartist okay I'm looking at the technicals and for those of you that don't know what technical analysis is I'm going to go over in a minute but I'm really looking at the price action of what's happening now if you like to follow fundamentals that's fine but you know you're not always going to have the accuracy rate with the fundamentals because a lot of times the stuff is already there's already built in there into the price already so it's after the fact and when you're trading and particularly if you're day trading you have to make split second decisions um minute by minute decisions what you're doing in trades so you really got to see right now this second where the stock is trading and make a decision and I like to know where I'm going with it ahead of time like I will figure out the support I will figure out the resistance I will figure out the targets all I will figure out as much as I possibly can before the open all right now that doesn't mean that it's always going to go to the target but very often the stocks do and so I'm looking at price because price supersuits everything even fundamentals in the market if you're a person that likes fundamentals fine use that combine with the technicals to do a good job trading but if it's not there you have to focus on the price and that's one of the reasons that I've called the market in this rally so a lot of people are looking at the market and they're saying well it's extended it's extended it's extended I'm not seeing that that's not what I'm seeing all right it doesn't mean you run out and buy the market today but I definitely don't think the market's a short right now all right so what is technical analysis it's the methods used to analyze securities and make investment decisions they fall into two categories like we said fundamental analysis and technical analysis fundamental analysis involves analyzing the characteristics of a company in order to estimate its value and in reference to the market it's usually news related events okay technical analysis takes a completely different approach it doesn't care one bit about the value of a company or commodity technicians which is what I am sometimes called chart is that's what I do I read a chart are only interested in the price of movements in the market so I say the market but it's really any stock symbol and again I'm trading stocks on the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange so I'm looking to at a daily chart of a stock and I am determining before the open after I see the gap I'm not predicting the gap itself I'm waiting to the stock gaps all right and then I'm looking at it and I'm saying okay where is this going to go in the gap today to day trade it can I short this can I buy it to make any money and again I'm looking at that specific morning time because I want the momentum to come in there and that's what I'm focusing on because if I see I'm going to get a lot of momentum that I see that I have the potential that I can take a trade and get something called the money move which I want to get early and that allows me to get in and out quickly to make this kind of money because really the shorter amount of time that you're in the market the less you're at risk so if I can get into trade in and out in five minutes two minutes one minute ten minutes I'd rather do that than hold a trade all day okay because anything can happen and you never know until you're out of the trade and the money is booked until the fat lady sings I say so the sooner I'm in and the sooner I'm out the better it is although to get big moves sometimes you do have to hold trades longer and and I'm not going to get too off target about this or often a tangent here about what we're talking about today I want to focus on the whole system itself but when you really want to get good at something it's like training yourself like in sports all right you have to train your body and your brain to do the same actions day after day after day after day and you're training your eyes to reprice in the charts you're training yourself to read strength you want to buy strength to make money going long and you're training your eyes to short weakness because that's how you're going to make money to the downside so you want to be able to read the weakness because that's how you're going to make money shorting weak okay so when you train your body and your brain to do certain actions every day take trades in and out in the morning look at charts take money off when you're up you know take stops when you train yourself it's your mind and your body to do the actions together because your mind can see everything right but if you don't press the button you're not going to make a dime and if you press the button before you're thinking through the trade then you're probably going to take the wrong action so it's the combination of your brain and body together that you must train doing the same actions and that is something that I've done well since the start when I first first decided I wanted to day trade I didn't know what I wanted to do and there was a million different strategies out there and I probably looked at every single one one day ended up making a lot of money in a gap trade and it happened to be in a short okay which was funny because at the time I you know it was like long or short I was just happy to make a lot of money but this talked to a lot of momentum it was Netflix and I made over five grand in one day and that was that was like the first week I ever traded live money so you know and then I said there's something to this thing but there's not a lot out there about gaps and I'm telling you that the places that are out there that talk about gaps very often are saying a lot of the opposite things that I'm saying gaps are the gaps are complex I'd like to say you can buy every bullish gap or short every bearish gap but you can't all right you just can't and if it was that easy then it would be very easy to trade the fact is that there are specific ones that are better than others that have the institutional buying or selling to come into them and that's what I look at in my system but the one thing I did well from the start is focusing just on one thing and that has helped me to become successful and and more successful as time has gone on and to teach people as well I think a lot of people want to beat jack of all trades and everything but then they never get good at anything and and you don't have to do a lot of things what you can do if you want to make more money in the market is take over nights take swing trades take options take day trades use one system for different types of trades and also risk more money over time and that's how you make more but again first things first get to the point where you're even doing something consistently at all and then you can increase your size it's not about doing lots and lots and lots of things so chart reading is a skill and it's really like learning a new language like if you go out you want to learn Spanish but which is an important language to learn right now in the US you know or if you go to a foreign country and you're there for just a short period of time and and you know you want to learn what the language is so you go on a vacation to France something you know it's it's like a whole new thing and charts is like that so the more you do it guess what the better you get even if you read charts in a weekend at night after four o'clock when you're out of a trade you're going to learn something if you take the time to sit down and focus on it so what do I do as I've been saying I focus on technical analysis and gaps and understanding price is critical to determine if I want to take a trade or if I don't want to take a trade and that's where it gets down to it what's important and what's not what's important is price you can say all these things in the world here's the support and here's the resistance and here's this and here's that Melissa you know like I was saying people are saying well the markets extend it all right listen the market's getting bought talk about strength there's incredible strength right now in the in the market and how is that there what when we're talking about price and what does that really mean what does it translate into if you're just reading a chart it's flatting your screen it's money so if there's money along the market people are long whatever stock okay it could be any stock at all I'm just talking right now about the spy which is an ETF if people are along the spy then they are in it with money with a lot of money the market's being bought up so that's a sign of strength in the price it's not a sign of weakness so for people to say well the market has extended well where's the sign of weakness in the market I don't I don't see it all right in fact all you've seen is follow through not only since the election although you've seen a tremendous follow through since the election because the market's moved 20% but the market's been bullish actually for years all right when you're going to short something you want to short what panicky action and this is why I prefer to short to be honest with you because I like to get in and out of trades quickly and it's just the fact that stocks tend to drop faster than they tend to rally and you have to be more patient with longs and sometimes that's hard for me to do but if you can be patient you can you can get some shorts to bigger targets as well but the quick move is what I'm looking for and it's the sell-off it's the panic when people are are upset and they're down and you're shorting that all right now here was an example actually of of strength this is amazon stock close to your gap up okay this was an earnings on amazon out in october the stock had a huge move so again this is a gap just to quickly go over stock close here on 980 boom open the next day here into the open into 930 from 4 o'clock to 930 stock opened around 1060ish hit a huge move of the day flew over 1100 and again the stock was bought and it got bought ever since it actually won over 1200 which you know was the next number and so you have buyers in here so this is buying that happened in the gap so this was a good long and you could have also done it as an option trade anyways my system looks at 26 points which I figure out all ahead of time so I'm not ever just trading on the fly I'm rating each gap in the morning before I trade I'm determining that if it's a good long or a good short based on the gap before 930 it's reading the momentum in the gap that's helping me predict if it's going to come through on the live date like for example that amazon all right now again we went over this but here's the definition what is a gap a stock gaps of the opening price today is different from the closing price of the previous day's trading a gap is a break in the price action from one day to the next simple what is not simple is determining where you're going to take the gap longer short and also which gap to do I think it's best to do one ticker symbol a day sometimes I do two it's rare I do three usually if I do three I'm having a bad day but I typically like to do one trade a day and one ticker symbol and again that has to do with the focus but the idea is what stock to watch because there's thousands of stocks that even gap every day actually if you want to be really specific most things gap every day it's rare that something would close at 3205 and open the next day at 930 and 3205 exactly but I don't consider something that closes at 3205 and opens the next day at 32110 necessarily a gap that I would look at a rate but really most things gap period every day it's about finding the one to focus on and again it's about the momentum and again it's about getting it right into the open now let's look here at this adsk this was one from last week and actually I was I was on tv this day but I saw it at night so you can sometimes pick a good one at night stock closed here the night before around 1 30 boom opened in the morning here around 114 stock did what gapped down so this like I said happened in the nighttime it was an earnings gap reported after four in the after hours and then held the gap into the morning into 930 and it was a short and here you have a stock that just had a huge big move went to the dream target so what are you shorting here you would have shorted panicky selling action all right because the stock action was a good long until here and you can see the rally rallied all the way up from october rally rally rally main new brand all-time highs actually the day before the earnings up over 130 but then whatever the earnings said again I don't read the reports you see the reaction and what it did so I coined my system of golden gaps because it's like finding gold in the market because you look for stocks that have these huge massive moves because you're looking for institutional money you're looking for it to sell or go along the gap in the case of amazon great example of institutional money buying that stock number one the price point and the move ahead of the day which was like almost 100 points up in 24 hours and then adsk another great example because the stock dropped six bucks on the day and for stock to sell off like that you have to have big money selling their long shares or shorting it but golden gaps are made by professional traders and institutions banks hedge funds you know they have tons and tons of money in the market and that's what you want to look for because that's what where the momentum is and you can see here even the volume go back to the absk see the big volume bar this is volume down here come here to do all the other days huge in fact let's go look at the amazon one so there you have it as well big huge so this is again the volume so these are the days that you wanted to be playing it you know it's not to say that you wouldn't maybe be doing some other gaps but do you see here the difference between playing something like this or even going along one of these days in here I mean this is how you're going to make the money this is where you want to hit it and you don't you don't know okay because you again you're looking for stocks that your different ticker symbols every single solitary day so let's go over the again the concept institutional money they move the market they're moving the market up all right it typically do like to go long although institutions will short but you know most of the mutual funds all these they're they're they're long stocks okay so what I'm looking at doing is to play with that money because it's easy to make money when you're with that money you're never going to move a stock yourself even if I had you know 3,000 people in the trading room we wouldn't move a stock and I do trade stocks that have volume and typically have a good share size in the day I'm not trading thin stocks and I never do penny stocks either so you really want to play stuff that moves a dollar two dollars three dollars four dollars five dollars all right and the trading range of stocks so I have a formula to rate which gap to play gaps are an event if you look at a print out a daily chart and look at circle all the gaps they create a sense of urgency in the good ones they force an action by participants of the stock whether people are long or shorted they have to either buy it or sell it something's going to happen so it's a powerful way to profit in the market as a trader again that's the idea of the strategy itself the event is the gap so the strategy is the gap so whether I'm looking at support or resistance whether I'm looking to go long or short it the determining factor is is it gapping number one and does the gap rate per my system per the 26 points good enough to do it at all because like I said not every gap is playable so it's the combination of power money moving stocks with volume okay and momentum reading the price reading the support and resistance levels in what's happening the gap and then the time of the day and watching it to take the move all right you make money in the market by taking a stock in the right direction predicting it before it happens and getting in before the money move occurs and that doesn't even before the gap because remember like I said I'm not predicting the gap itself but I'm waiting until the gap happens then I'm qualifying the ticker symbols of the gaps I want to trade and I narrow it down to look at one or two a day so here was again the ADSK again if you pull this up on your scanner after 10 o'clock here's after 10 you say oh well this is lower but who the heck wants to short this thing in here what you want to do is know at the night or beforehand in the morning whatever that this is good to watch it right out of the gate so you see here whether you got this move here or whether you got this move here this is where you want to be entering the stock as far as your price point to get the short you don't want to be waiting I'm looking till after 10 I mean there's no good entering in here then although this was one you could have played later in the afternoon but again I like to focus in the morning so you have to be able to predict that this is going to break and drop and go not that it's going to lift and fill the gap which by the way does not work it's not to say that some gaps don't fill themselves but I never use the terminology it's a made-up thing and it really doesn't work because institutions don't trade like that all right traders trade like that and so what I'm looking for is what is an institution going to do with ADSK today or this could be anything Amazon whatever and that's what I'm trying to figure out before I do it anyways like I said this was a good gap gap down here fell broke low in the day was like one of six something and here was the short so how do you make money you watch the one-minute chart you pick the gap beforehand you know which one you like in which direction you're going to do it you got a way for the setup and the short was in here and you got the drop so whether you held it all the way down whether you got out at 10 o'clock whether you held to the target it doesn't matter you're up okay but this was a huge huge trade that you could have gotten at a great price because it was a highly qualified gap and again time of the day 944 for the setup before 10 entry and we'll go back and look at this in a minute 111 90 stop 1255 this was the correct timing to do this for the correct short although there were people in the room that did this earlier this was this is you know per my system this would have been the correct entry if you took an advanced risk 2500 chairs would have been what 1625 again you want to hit around that $1000 mark if you're going to be able to hit these numbers of 20 grand a month eggs that have be held it all the way down 108 which you might not have done this would have been your goal for pretty much the whole week and really half your month and I just use this example here to show you that some of these ones if they're going you don't have to get out and the reason I want to show you this here is because the cell off just kept going I'll show you how to you could have managed it anyways here was the drop some people in the room did it here but technically per the system the proper entry was here anyways here was the drop now if you took it here and you got out here guess what that was still a great move this is down around 110 now you're up in here if you get it down you say well I really like it I think it's going to go it rates really well you know we don't worry about the market today pushes back you could have pulled the stop down lower the stop and you were still been up here and then you got it down and dropped so if you're up in something it's not like you have to kill it by 10 as the point I just want to make but you got to manage it tight or you could get out of half but you will have days like this when something really runs and really goes and guess what this makes up for the days that you don't trade it makes up for the couple days you have losses in a month because you're going to have two or three days in a month where you have losses and that's part of trading but you need to make money more days than you lose and again it's very important to me to use stops now let's look at the spy so that was a short this is a long show this is a what a bullish gap and this was this was just a great call so last week the spy gapped up closed here gapped up this was last week on Thursday so this is Thursday Friday Monday here's today I don't know what we're trading today anyways the market gapped up and was a long she could have gone long the spy in here on Thursday and we did that in the room was a nice trade so I'm going to show you this again you could have aggressively did it here is the one minute chart I squished it to show you the whole train but anyways I felt a high level of conviction this would go to the number of the target of the day I felt very certain of it and in fact it went past the number I said but anyways you could have taken a here and got out you could have taken a here and got out I did give the targets in the room anyways we did it in here dropped rally back dropped if you stayed with the train it kept going it went 225 I said I felt 100% or 265 I said I felt 100% certain it will go to 266 is where it went so many people got out of 265 but if you held it guess what it went straight up so here's the area here look where it got the lift this is 264 I know this is really small here's where the lift got so again you would have followed the trade up and again you got to manage it though so you don't want to let something drop against you anyways this was the entry all the way down in here though so early in the morning so this is see here you want to get in here and you could have got out before 10 anyways entering this was 224.05 this is a great call stop 223.50 originally was 223.16 and then I said give it give a little bit more room time of the day actually was a little bit later than this 3000 shares advanced risk 1950 exit 225.95 right up a boot over 226 and go over you take it anyways this was a really good call $5700 profit it's basically your week so last week actually you could have only done this one trade and hide your goal for the week but you would have had to risk $1,950 and people always ask about the size of the price point in the spy again this is the benefit if you want to have a prop account all right where you would be able to take a position size like this where you get more leverage in the monies but what if you can't then you take a thousand shares if you took a thousand shares of this no matter how you slice it the moon was two bucks up if you took 500 shares you made a thousand bucks if you took a thousand shares you made two thousand bucks it's real money people and this is what people just just don't understand sometimes they want to do stuff that's why people tend to go to these penny stops and things I mean they're just so risky you know there's no way to accurately have any conviction in anything they're going to do most of them move on news events other it's just like trading crap you know I'd rather see people take small size and stuff that runs and moves and you can accurately predict even if it's a little bit expensive take a hundred shares it's profit all right that's how you're going to get good and then you grow your account and you get to the point where you can you can make this kind of money and take this kind of size but I will tell you that many of the stocks that we look at trading are between you know like 25 and 65 but sometimes you get an expensive one anyways what do I do I rate the guy in the morning I wait for it to set up after 930 I don't trade in the pre-market I take the trade I put in the stock with a fixed risk if it gets stopped out I get stopped out I take the loss if I'm in it I'm up I try to hold it to the target or for the first move what I call the money move I get out with profit all right and that is what I do and if you come and learn from me that's what you learn all right so I have a checklist it's a professional way to trade and I focus on one system and I don't need to do anything else you can use it for swing trading you can use it for options trading the benefit of options is you don't have to worry about leverage so you could have done an option trading the spy and you wouldn't worry to have to worry about the buying power of the margin what I'm looking for is stocks that are gapping that have a high probability of directional bias for the entire day okay and an ideal word you want to be able to do something all day long or short a big move of the day again want that big move want the momentum early confirmation between 930 and 10 and precise entries with good follow through and a good risk to reward and I'm trading in the one-minute chart which a lot of people don't really do but you would learn how to do that from me and I find there's a high level of accuracy in that not after 10 but before 10 there is so it's a multipurpose system that you can use for many things and again you have to look at you know what your time is whether you can trade in that eastern time in the morning in that time if you can't whether you can use a system for options you're not going to learn how to take an option trade from me but you would learn the system to be able to know if you could buy a put or buy a call in something so this market's had a big big move it's been rallying as you see and we'll see where it goes I think 2018 is going to be a very exciting year to trade I think 2018 is going to have a lot of volatility in it in stocks in the market and it's going to be very clear when things are strong the clear the market is showing its its hand the clear it's going to be to read other stocks I don't know if that makes any sense but like right now it is so clear to me how strong the market is and when I look at stuff then that's crap it's so clear to me then that it's not a buy or that it's a short all right but if you really want to get good and you really want to make money trading you really want to do it as a profession you got to get serious about it and I think 2018 is going to be a great year to trade as a day trader because you're going to see a lot of the moves and you're going to see a lot of action in the market and and it's just the beginning I mean I think it's just the beginning of a time of economic growth for the country and and all of that is is already started I mean it's already started but you're really going to start to see it so again gaps why is playing gaps give you an edge because it's an event in the chart and you have momentum in them they typically have big moves which is a day trader you want okay otherwise you're scalping and a lot of times it's very difficult to make money scalping you have to do too many trades in a day your commissions add up to be too much money it's so much nicer if you just take one trade in one trade out and be done for the day and have your goal like that many traders are very active and trade all day and they've got more losses because they're taking more trades I think the market is something that you can do and you can make money doing but you kind of got to also look at it like you got to take your money and run I only say you know no piggies because sometimes you have a really good day and you just feel like you're unstoppable but nobody's unstoppable against the market so if you look at it like I have one job to go in and do this thing every day and then stop when I'm up then you'll do so much better it's just one of these things where less is more and that's one of the things I think gives me an edge too you're never going to have a lot of losses that way you're going to keep the money that you make when you're up you're gonna you're gonna have a respect for the market where you just take what it gives you and it does give it to you it does give it to you just you have to be able to find it this idea of trading trading trading I think you never get an edge like that when you trade all day and it just racks up your commissions and you never really get good at one thing and you end up going long and short long and short long and short one of the reasons that I've gotten so good at reading this bullish market so accurately is because I really focused on shorts at the beginning of my career and I did get really good at reading weakness in charts and as a result of that eventually then I became very good at reading strength because then I saw what was not weak and that's where I'm saying the market is still going to continue and people are thinking well like with the sell-off that happened on Friday or even yesterday it's it's not any sense of urgency I guess for the market now let's quickly talk about percentage of return and day trading and in our concept these are things that I did not create okay but you can use these things to help you determine how much you want to risk all right I use stocks it's good idea to have a set risk per trade whether it's a hundred dollars two hundred dollars five hundred dollars if you want to make 20 grand a month though you're gonna have to use a minimum of a thousand but you should have similar to that in all of your risk all right so if you risk five hundred dollars a one trade and two thousand dollars another trade that is not similar so it has to be similar so you know it's called an R unit and it should be the same for most of your trades or as close to as you can when you're looking at return on investments in positions for options again it doesn't have to do with the margin or buying power it's how much money you're risking and can you flip it around so ideally you want to be able to flip around a trade that you're risking an option a hundred percent return investment meaning if you risk a thousand bucks what you're looking to make a thousand bucks so if you're up a thousand if you're in a trade you risk a thousand bucks if you're up eight fifty doesn't mean you don't get out no you could get out it's basically your goal is in all right so the idea is you need to make your money work for you whether it's day trading and the R concept or whether it's option trades with return investment you want to be able to look at it and say i'm making my money work for me in a good way which again is like i said i don't look at scalping i don't really scout but this was a trade back i called on the walmart the set earnings i called it the day we did it as a day trade and then i called it as an option trade i called the 100 calls stock went almost to that number the day of and then the next day it went through it um so it was a quick trade you could have bought this for 35 cents again no margin and bp in options so 15 contracts would have cost you what 525 bucks all right and you could have made 975 dollars so again if your risk is a thousand you would have made even more you would have made almost two grand but do you see here how you could have hit your goal with that as an option trade two and you could have done this one here i'm seeing this this is back in october i don't remember the reason for this but this was an earnings gap and this was a really good one so this gap in the morning i saw this would get to that hundred dollar number and it and it did and actually this is ready this is setting up to break out again this is the current chart of this here we're talking about this in the room this morning this is going to do something significant soon again bullish anyways let's talk quickly about results i'm just going to quickly go through in here because i know we're getting close on time and i want to give some questions this was all the trades caught in the room from october there were days i wasn't here that a trade i did radio and tv but i just want to show you i did not trade all of these days and look at the results okay but this is an advanced risk show in the parentheses is how you show a loss these are losses and you just see here how i did one trade one trade two trades two trades see this is how you put together a week how you put together a month and it doesn't mean that every trade is positive but more trades are positive than negative but you can see here there's not a lot of trades this is how you become profitable you just get very very focused so october was a really big month over 35 grand for october again it was earnings season november started off slow got into it really strong strong week then the second week in november and then didn't have trades some of the days again some of the days if it doesn't meet your criteria you don't do anything close for the holiday good week last week and now here we are it's the end of the year so november was good over 26 grand so these results are possible this is if you did all my trades i called in the room i give the entry i give the stop i give the target you must take my course in order to join the live trading room but i'm doing a special through friday of this week for the last class of the year where you would get the trading room free for one year one quick thing i'll say here though is if you decide you want to do this for a career you must take it seriously it you know must take it seriously that means time that means money it means the investment and learning from someone like me in the cost of the class opening up an account during the platform and and part of that is an emotional investment too because if you've been trying to trade and you've been unsuccessful and you've been losing money in the market you got to get past it because i mean if you can't let it go about this crap that's happened in the past then you're never going to be successful the longer you hold on to stuff that's happened in the past if you've taken classes and haven't learned from the people or if you lost money in the market it's not going to help you become successful there are stumbling blocks all along the way if you really really want to be successful in life no matter what you want to do and trading is absolutely no different one of the benefits is that you're in and out quickly if you trade my strategy for the most part most days were done early and obviously you can work from home so think about what i said think about your plan of action for 2018 what do you want to do you can you know teach yourself and create your own strategy like i did that's a long expensive process or you can learn from someone else you know those are pretty much your choices if you want to make it but i think people don't take trading seriously enough and and you must so i have only serious people that come to me they paint for the course and they are in the room and we're very focused in the morning trading room is open from 8 3 to 11 all right only in the morning and that's the time that i want to focus on trading i have one solid strategy i look at you'll learn multiple entries and plays in the class you will learn one afternoon entry though it's rare that i do it you're gonna learn how to trade the open look at gaps and you're gonna learn you know how to really think about money in a way that that's gonna help you be successful and uh we're almost at the end here though i'm gonna try to rush through this here to get some questions because i know we're going short on the time here but um my class teaches a 26 point rating system it's two full days and you would learn from me uh and the differences that i created my own method and it's all that i do it's all that i teach i'm very passionate about the market about stocks about gaps about what i do like i said earlier i've been i've been talking on television and you know my passion comes across and that's how i've got to do it you know i really really do love the market and i love them the biggest thing i love i guess is the fact that i have the ability to be able to predict where somebody's gonna go it does not mean that i'm right all the time but i definitely am right a lot and i think that when you are passionate about something that you do it really comes across it comes across in my training in my class when if you come to learn from me as a student it makes a big difference because it helps to reinvigorate you if you've lost the passion for training you've been doing it for years you know you gotta get that back again otherwise how are you ever gonna how are you ever gonna make it all right so you will learn how to trade gaps with me and here's the information so it's a full two-day course and how to strategically find pick-and-play stocks that are professional bearish gaps the class is online it can be anywhere in the world and take it it's December 16th and 17th nine to five eastern time cost of the class is 49.99 if you're interested email me at melissa at the stockswush.com to sign up and like i said i'm running a special which the trading room and the options letter free for one year so be off 2018 through friday so the deadline for that is december 8th the class is the weekend of the 16th and 17th i also have a class for swing trades it's the trends course this is december 18th this is 9.99 it's one day if you want to learn it and you can sign up for both and you get the trading room an option letter free and you save $500 that'd be 54.99 you do them all three days in a row last class of the year and any questions i want to give a little time here that was awesome melissa thank you we've got one question here that came through it just has to do with being able to evaluate the the gaps how do you reliably predict the gaps the charts show past data so how are you able to translate that into something you can take into the start of the day well that's that's what technical analysis is you are looking at past price action on a chart to predict with the future price action so the 26 points that i was talking about that i review in my checklist before i determine if i'm shorting or going long something that whole point system is what you learn in my class i couldn't go over in five minutes it's a 16 hour course but that that is what i do that i look at the past price data and that helps me determine if it's 20 points or more per the 26 point system then it's going to go in the direction of the gap if it falls under the 20 point criteria then it has low odds again trading is about uh high odds you can't you can't predict 100 percent of anything so you're saying well i have all these things together i've got 20 points of 26 that tells me there's a very high chance this is going to work today with momentum and continue in the direction of the gap and if it rates under that low odds okay so in trading you have to assess the odds it's called calculated risk and that's also like i said where i use the stop but i couldn't explain all of that because that's that's what i charge money for it's worth money but it's also like 16 hours in the class but it's not something where you ignore that data you look at the data but i will tell you the challenge of reading stocks like amazon google walmart the spy is that a lot of these things don't have any past price data they're at all time highs so you look at something like walmart i mean there's times i'll call something and people take my trades in the room too and they're like they don't they don't know how i saw that i saw that walmart was going to get it to 100 and i just i mean i the only thing that i explained to you that i saw that was going to go to that number on that day or the day after was the was the sheer buying power that was coming in just just just coming in so quickly in the morning of the stock i mean i don't i don't even know how to describe it other than the fact that the gap rated well didn't mean you had to hold it to 100 we did the day train but it's like you you learn over time how to read something in when you're watching it trade live like it's a lot easier if you're watching it live and going back and looking at a stationary chart but there's no past price data in some of these stocks and that's why it really helps to be able to read that 30 minute period from 9 30 to 10 because once you learn how something acts in that period you can see oh my gosh this thing is going to go like a truck and run all day it's called power trending it's like power trending adsk power trended down walmart power trended up got it got it fair okay great great one of the question here from don don is asking us thoughts with big opening gaps the bid and the ask are often very wide how do you enter on these wide spreads you know a lot of i'm first of all i'm never entering something at 9 30 i never enter at the open i'm watching it to enter between 9 30 and 10 and usually things will thin out so i try to let it flush out a little bit and start to trade and i'm never getting into 9 30 and i also have to have volume before i even take it but i will tell you you gotta you gotta price it in the position so there are times when we will trade stocks that are spreading and sometimes expensive things are the spy spy isn't but you know if you're familiar with the stock which most of the things i'm familiar with i will tell the rim all say we're probably going to have a 10 cent spread in this not 30 cents but on the open it might be 30 cents but it tightens up so that's why you gotta wait a little bit but there are some stocks that have spreads and you price that in your wrist so if your stop is 50 cents and the spread is 10 cents you're gonna have to price it for 60 cents because you don't want to get dinged out because of the spread but you gotta know the stock and if you don't know the stock then my suggestion is don't trade it or you ask somebody like me got it okay great any other questions from the room great questions we had a few focused on how evaluating how melissa evaluates the gap melissa one of the other things i can do is put your email in the chat here if you're okay with that and if anybody wants to trial for the rest of the week wednesday thursday friday you can email me at melissathestockswish.com if you want to trial the room for free before this special expires wednesday thursday friday we should we we should have some good things there's some stuff that's out tonight um that i'm watching that i'm going to watch after hours to see that could move their lulus out this week uh hrb reports this week we're gonna have stuff to do it's not earning season in december you do have to be very very picky about what you trade uh but i will tell you that there's going to be some things that we get i'm like there's going to be the good ones and i will go after the good ones when we get them this month um to see but december is one of these months we've got to be picky but i'm picky all the time so if you want to trial uh to check out the room you can do a free trial this week fantastic great i put melissa's email in uh the chat box there so if uh you're interested in the trial which is a really great offer it's only tuesday so plenty of time left to trade yet this week go ahead and use that and for those of you getting ready to grab a sandwich or get your lunch or get back to whatever it is you were doing or maybe even get back to a little bit of trading at this afternoon thank you very much for joining us melissa thank you for that that was perfect and uh very helpful and also very different from what we've historically had here which we really appreciate for our top shelf audience so thank you for sharing thank you thanks for having me and have a great holiday absolutely thank you and for everyone that's joined us we'll go ahead and publish a recording for this and any links that would need to be included either from melissa and her team or for the video look for that in a follow-up email so have a great rest of the week everyone and we look forward to being in touch soon take care thanks