Yes, hello everybody. How y'all doing today? Lee Lowell here, smartoptionseller.com. Today is Saturday, January 29, 2022. Welcome to another edition of our Saturday Synopsis. Hope everyone's doing well this morning. What do we do here at the Saturday Synopsis? Well, we look at charts. That's what we do. We look at the indexes. We look at individual stocks. We look at support and resistance levels. We look at technical indicators. I'm a technical analyst. I'm a chart reader. That is what I do to help me find my trades and time my trades to get in and out of them. I'm here to help you become a better trader. Show you what I'm seeing. Show you what I do and give you some tips and tricks and things. And what I do is could be completely different from what other people see on the chart. So I'm giving you my point of view and I hope I can help you along the way. And as a side note here, I get people emailing me. They say, Lee, we can see that you're wearing some kind of college sweatshirt most of the time. And I know you can't see it. But let me just pan down here a little bit. So my alma mater, University of Vermont, class of 1989. So there I think I just outed myself as far as my age. So there you go. That's where I went to college. So let's move on here. What are we doing? We're looking at charts. Let's get right into it. Let's open up. We always look at the SPY first, which is the exchange traded front for the S&P 500, easily tradable in and out all day long. You can you can trade it just like a stock. But it gives us a great overview of the market as a whole. Now it's been two weeks since I gave my last synopsis here. So we have we have a lot to talk about. There's been a lot of action, a lot of movement. So let's let's open this up a little bit. And for those that are just joining us, we look at daily charts. This is a daily bar chart, open, high, low, closed bar charts. Each one of these lines is one day's worth of trading. And I've got three moving averages. I got a 20 day, a 50 day and a 200 day all important 200 day moving average here. Those are all simple moving averages. And I have the 14 day RSI down at the bottom with the 80 level and 20 level as my oversold and overbought top and bottom areas. So let's just jump right in. A couple of weeks ago, we were flirting with with the, you know, we were in this channel, what do we do? We draw some channels, channels help us gauge, you know, which direction a market is moving. Obviously, we know since the pandemic back in March, February, March, 2020, we came off pretty good. And then we've just gone higher since. So the market's been in a nice uptrend. And we draw these channels, which connect the tops and connect the bottoms over a period of time to help us gauge where the market's been going. So obviously we've been going higher since and we've had, you know, we have pullbacks along the way. Okay, we've got ups and downs and ups and downs. So we use those pullbacks to, since we're bullish and I'm bullish, we use those pullbacks as as timing patterns to help us get into new trades. What do we do with the smart option seller? We sell put options. We sell put option credit spreads. Those are more neutral to bullishly directional trades. So we're always looking to get in on a pullback and hoping for the bounce. And we use these indicators that the moving averages and the channels to help us gauge the timing.  Okay, so this is pretty scary for a lot of people. This is a pretty large move. There's no doubt about it. Very large move. And that can scare people out of positions. And it could make people think this is it. This is the end of the world. You know, the market's coming to an end. We're never going to go up again. So don't, you know, I'm here to tell you that that's not how it works. Yes, there's always going to be pullbacks. Some definitely larger than others. There's no question about that. But as I've been saying, for quite a long time, if you're in it for the long haul, which I am personally, now I'm not giving any investment advice here, but I'm in for the long haul, we know the market goes up over time over the long run, the market goes up, let's pull back to the monthly, see where the S&P 500 has been since we had the the the financial crisis in 2008 2009, we've had this massive move higher. And yes, that is a lot of it has been due to central banks around the world keeping interest rates very low. But but that's not the only reason why the market has gone up. The market goes up because the market is made up of actual companies that create actual products that create actual profits for these companies. And if a company is profitable, there's no other way for their stock price to go then up. Okay. So the stock market is made up of profitable companies. And and their price has to go up over time, regardless of whatever else is happening out in the world. Yes, interest rates has an effect. Wars has an effect pandemics has an effect. But those effects are temporary. Those effects are temporary. Okay, here's the financial crisis, interest rates were brought down. But over time, we'll have pullbacks. Okay, but the market will find its way higher, because companies are making profits. Here's the pandemic right here, March 2020, and look how quickly it it bounced back. Yes, central banks stepped in again. But just remember, companies are still having profitable products. And they're they're making more money over time. So don't let don't be swayed by the news narrative out there. Yes, we have COVID, we have interest rates are about to go up again here in the US at least we have inflation out there. But there's always going to be a news story that that can try to scare you out of your positions or try to make you think that we're the world is going to end, we're going to have a bear market for the rest of our days. It's not how it works. Yes, we're going to have pullbacks. So you have to be prepared for that and look at it as more of a buying opportunity. If you have stocks or indexes, you can buy the SPY. That's what I do for the long run. I buy bits and pieces on pullbacks to, you know, keep my portfolio moving higher in the long run. And sometimes these are, these are we look forward to these pullbacks, because it allows us to get into trades cheaper, instead of selling down here and then watching it go higher without you. Okay, yes, it's scary in real time when it's actually happening. And you may see your portfolio dropping value, my portfolio drops in value too. But we know based on history, it's temporary, and it will go back up again. When does it go back up? It goes back up when it goes back up, you know, we can't force the market to go up back up. But we can look at look for clues or cues to help us figure out, you know, when it may turn. Okay, so I've been buying lightly on the way down, not putting everything out there that I have. And there's a point where I say, Okay, I bought I bought up enough for now, I'm going to wait to see what happens. So let's let's look at the charts and see what we can figure out here and what we can glean from our indicators and moving averages and things like that. So obviously, the S&P 500 fell out of bed, it fell through the channel, it's falling below the moving averages. So here's the 200 day moving average. This is a very, very, very important moving average. Now, if you'll look back at history on a daily chart, at least, you're not going to see many times where the the indexes fall below the 200 day moving average for more than a short period of time. Now, this was an aberration. This was the pandemic. But any other time that a market moves below a 200 day moving average, it will bounce back somewhat quickly. Quickly, how quickly is that? You know, days, weeks, definitely not months, not months and months. Okay. So here's what we're looking at. The S&P 500 has fallen below the 200 day moving average. And it's having it's having this very volatile, wide churning action down here. What do I mean by that means up and down, up and down, up and down, just churning up and down in this very large range in this, this was this, this was a whole week's worth of trading right here, very large range up and down, people getting whipsawed back and forth. Well, what does it mean? Does it mean that that we're going to go higher now or we're going to keep going lower? So there's a, there's I've got some conflicting types of thoughts here. And and I and I know I'm going to sound a little wishy washy but but that's when you're in a period of indecision. Okay. So to me, when I if I'm just looking at price action and price action is just the way that the market is moving. This tells me we've got a big downtrend. We've got a congestion here, which could lead to it's figuring out where it wants to go next. I have a feeling we could see some more downside. I don't know if any of you watch CNBC but Jim Cramer said something that for once I sort of agree with is that one way what we the one way that the market finds the bottom is as is that we have a complete washout of all these longs in the market and and a complete washout will look like a really huge long one day move to the downside where it just everyone just says I'm out I'm throwing in the towel I'm giving up and you'll have this big watershed one day down move that will bounce very quickly and then we'll start to move higher. We could could see that washout move in the near future. Okay, this could be maybe a bearish a bearish flag where you get the long move, you got the congestion and then the continuation down. Now, on the flip side, this, we could we could be heading higher as well. And the reasons for that is because number one, the RSI got pretty oversold down here. Okay, so we got oversold RSI were well below the 200 day moving average for a period of time. A bounce could occur. Now, where did the SPY finish on Friday yesterday, which was January 28. It finished just below the 200 day moving average. Okay, you can see on the right side of the chart, this is little dash mark on this long bar. That's where it closed for the day. So it closed on the high of the day, which is which is a good thing. But it didn't close above the 200 day moving average got close. So there could be more selling. There could be more selling. Now, but the other reason why I think we may may see a bottom here is because of the VIX. Now, let's take a look at the VIX. The VIX is the fear indicator within the market. And it's and it's made up of it's made up of or its values derived from the front month S&P 500 options contracts. Okay, but the fear gauge, it tells you how much fear and volatility is happening in the market. And, and the VIX will always spike when the market drops the VIX in the market move inversely to each other. So when the market drops, the VIX goes up. But, and I've talked about this before, the VIX is mostly made up of these, these quick spikes. Okay, you can see all the spikes and they don't last very long. You know, a couple days sometimes, not more than a couple weeks at most, not even a couple weeks a week or two at most. So you'll see, this is where we are right now, we've had the spike close to got close to the 40 level, which we haven't seen since, you know, October of 2020. So typically, you'll have the quick spike at the VIX will retreat, and then the market itself will go back up. Okay, so I'm cautiously optimistic that with the VIX retreating, that means that the selling is becoming exhausted. And the market itself is going to turn back higher again. Okay, so we've had this churning down here, maybe because the volatility is subsiding. Now the market can run back higher. Plus we've had a pretty good down move, you know, the stock market is where people make money. And over the last 100 200 years, even the stock market has been the best place for portfolio returns, you know, better than any other, any other investment. So when you have a good pullback like this, a lot of people, the large funds, the large, the big players see this as an opportunity to get back in because you can't make good money unless you're in the stock market. There's a point where it's come off enough. There's enough bargains out there that people will start to buy. Okay, so we could see the buying only because everything sold off so much. And and there's like bargain buys right now. So I know I'm talking about both sides here. There's a there's a bearish case and there's a bullish case. But there's but but for me, there's a reason why I'm standing aside right now because there's too much indecision. I'm not confident to know yet whether okay, this thing's gonna start popping out or if we're gonna have that wash out watershed moment. So I'm kind of taking it light in our newsletters, in our smart options seller and vertical spread trader newsletters, we're taking it light as well, we're sitting on our hands for right now because there's no sense of putting money on the line. If we're not really sure what's where the market's going to go next. So we're kind of light on positions at the moment. And that's a and that's fine. It's fine to sit on the sidelines. You don't have to be in there every second of the day trying to make trades. That's not a good you can you'll lose more money than than you'll make if you're trying to trade in this choppiness here. So anyway, we're kind of light. So we're watching the other thing that I that I wanted to show you was the the the fear, the fear index, the CNN fear index. So let me pull that up real quick. Okay, so here we have the the CNN fear and greed index. And I think I've brought this up before. This tells you how much fear or greed is in the market at the moment. And when you have more fear, that means typically you use it as a contrarian indicator. So when everyone's fearful, everyone's selling, that's the time to get in and buy, right? When when we're at extreme greed, that's when we're really hitting those tops. And you know, maybe you should lighten up on some positions. I'd like to see this get a little bit more extreme fear. I'd like to see it get into the extreme fear level. And that would make me think more that we've definitely hit bottom. So keep an eye on this. I mean, it's kind of a fun thing that don't use it as your end all be all indicator, but it's just something that you could keep an eye on. So let's go back to the charts here. So we have the we have the price action getting oversold, could get could have that one last watershed sell out, or we could we could see that was the bottom, you know, we got the the VIX coming off the fear and greed index in fear mode. So that could be a time where okay, well, we had a good Friday yesterday, and we'll just continue that next week. So we also like to look at the S&P 500 futures, because that thing trades almost 24 hours a day. So I want to just bring this up here and has the same pattern as the S&P 500, but it trades longer hours, you can see that it actually closed here's the close above the 200 day moving average yesterday. So I'm kind of optimistic about that as well. So this is the futures and it closed just above the 200 day moving average got the churning action here. So let's see, I'm still a little on the sidelines, you know, I'm just waiting to see what's going to happen. And it's okay to not find the bottom, you know, people try to pick bottoms and sometimes you can get burned. But I think it's better to wait until you see confirm price action. Let's look at the NASDAQ.  I know I have a lot of stuff on the screen here. These are just things that I've marked up in the past, you can see the long channel, and you have these some triangle patterns and other channels within the long channel. Okay, so you have longer term moves and then these shorter term moves. So we had the sort of a sideways channel here, and it popped through just like the SAP 500. Now the NASDAQ's gotten hit a lot harder. They didn't SAP 500, you got a lot of these tech stocks that will react a little bit more violently when when there's news of, you know, right potential rising interest rates, because a lot of these companies have to borrow money.  And if interest rates go up, their debt levels are going to their their debt payments are going to go up as well if they're taking out new new money borrowing new money. So anyway, we have the churning action here way, way down below the 200 day moving average. I just think that spending this much time below the 200 day moving average is based on history, a reason for the snap back higher. The RSI got close to oversold as well. So we've had a lot of selling, we've had a lot of quick selling. But once again, we could have that watershed sell off, and then it'll bounce. It's always a quick one, it's, you know, big one day move and then the bounce comes. Or we just, or we found the bottom and we're ready to go higher. So once again, we're light here, we're staying on the sidelines till we can see what happens. The Dow, we can look at the Dow. This is the diamonds, the DIA, which is the exchange traded fund for the Dow. The Dow's been a little bit more flat, doesn't have the huge moves like the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, but it still had the sell off over the last few weeks, below the 200 day moving average. But the Dow, and if you if you're playing a lot of different stocks, you'll see some of these old Dow stalwarts didn't get hit as hard, the individual stocks. So there's no that rotation people are showing the tech stocks, they're buying more comfort stocks, these old, old Fuddy Duddies, which are not bad, but so the Dow's a little bit more flattish and can help you emotionally if it's hard for you to accept, you know, a losing position. But anyway, all right, so let's take a look at some individual stocks here and see what's happened. And so we go through my list here and we'll open up with Apple because Apple was our savior yesterday, Friday, January 28th. Apple had earnings that came out on Thursday, the 27th, or was it the 20, yeah, the 28th, no, the 27th, I'm sorry, was on Thursday after the market closed. And so Apple was up $11 a share yesterday, Friday, and, you know, basically pulled pulled everything up with it, which is fine. You know that we need that we needed that. So here's Apple, I'll pull back a little bit. Apple had all time new highs above 180, not that long ago. And it fell down with everything else, but it had the nice move yesterday, got back above the support area that had been broken now it and it finished on the highs, you can see the dash mark finished on the highs. And it's just touched the 20 day moving average here. So Apple was was leading us yesterday. Thank you, Apple. I'm long Apple. You know, people have been asking me what have I been doing in this market? As I said, I'm buying little bits and pieces. I'm nibbling along the way on the down on the down move. And, you know, because I'm long term, I'm holding for long term, I know these stocks will go up over, over the long run. So that's what I've been doing. Apple, let's hope that it can continue and start making the move for, you know, more nor more all time new highs. Will it hit it very soon? We've got some back and forth to do probably. You know, you may see Apple trade around the support area for a little bit. Hopefully it won't get too much farther below again, the support line, which is roughly around $168 or so. But we'll see. We could have some churning back and forth. What else do we have? That was Apple. We'll look at Tesla. Tesla is very volatile, as we know. I can't trade it, you know, outright. I'll sell some way, way, way, way deep out of the money put options on Tesla. Hundreds and hundreds of shares lower than where the stock currently is at strike prices. But it's, it's, it's hard. The last thing that I drew was this channel and two weeks ago was on the 15th, 14th. So that was right around which day. So right around here, it was hitting along the top edge of the downtrending channel. And I said, is it going to break out to the higher or is it going to get knocked back down because of the resistance? And obviously it got knocked back down. So here it's sitting, it found support right on the 200 day moving average. We had the line here around $900 a share was the last support. It went through that. Now it's found support at the 200 day moving average. Let's see if Tesla could help the rest of the market bounce here and pull everything else higher with it. But you know, for right now, it's, it's, it's on the bottom leg of the, the edge here of this channel. So let's see if we could bounce. Amazon, Amazon got hit pretty good too. So Amazon had been in this long channel sideways channel was in a smaller channel here. And then it tried to pop above it a few times. It just, and it couldn't do it. Amazon's had a pretty, pretty big move down. And here was the bottom leg of the support line, which was, you know, 2800. Let's see what this was about 2875 or so. And it fell through it, but it's, it's churning right around the support area. If I had just extend this line a little bit, you can see that it came up finished on the highs of the day yesterday. So like the index, as you can see the churning action at the bottom here, getting oversold. So I'm hoping, I'm hoping that this is the bottom and we'll start to see the leg higher. I don't want to see that watershed wash out moment because that's scary. We don't like to see that. So let's, let's hope we found the bottom and move up. But once again, we're a little light here because we want to see what's going to happen. Let's talk about Netflix.  Now Netflix had its earnings and just the market crushed it. You can see it went from, you know, $500 a share all the way down to 350. So it lost about $150 a share. But the big thing is, is that Netflix has lost about 50% of its values, given half of its value since making all time new highs here of $700 a share on November 17th. So a little over two months later, it's lost 50% of its value. That is massive for a quality company like Netflix. Half of its value, 700 all the way down to 350. You can see how low the RSA got. The RSA on the low got into single digits here, got around nine, the nine level. That's just insane. So we, this could be the bottom for Netflix. I mean, it was just way oversold. I don't think Netflix can is going to go much slower. All the all the selling from the earnings announcement is done for now should be done. So it'll probably trade around here for a while. It has to digest a huge move like that. What do I mean? I mean, it we're going to trade sideways for a while until people figure out is it worth buying Netflix now? Most of the selling should be done. So it could turn around here and then and then slowly it'll it'll start to move back up again. I mean, losing 50% of a value. That's a humongous move. So I'm going to keep an eye on Netflix and see if it starts to turn higher, then I'll know that okay, it has found the floor and the bottom's in and it'll should slowly start to move back up. So we'll keep an eye on Netflix. What other stocks do we like to look at AMD? So we always talk about AMD. I like AMD. AMD has come off quite quite a bit too was around $165 a share a few weeks ago, or you know, a month or almost six, seven weeks ago, and now it hit 100 just under 100. So for me, when I like to buy nibbles here and there, I waited until it came down to the 200 day moving average right around $109 $110 a share. And so I bought this this past week, last couple days in between 100 to 110, I actually was able to buy some at $100 a share. And so this is where I bought in, you know, some shares 100 to 110. So this is my range. Let's see if it'll continue either, you know, the support is right around 100, but we're getting oversold here. So I'd like to see it bounce back with everything else. It finished the day on the high around $105 a share. So we'll see what happens with AMD. Okay, so let's take a look at some other stocks. Let's go through this Microsoft always a solid. What's happening here? My Okay, so Microsoft sorry, a little glitch there for a second. So Microsoft still strong pop down through the 200 day moving average but came back very quickly. You can see they had earnings that came out and got knocked back knocked down but it but it popped really good. So finished on the high yesterday. Let me pull this down a little bit here. So Microsoft people love Microsoft. So, you know, use the 200 day moving average is basically the last line in the sand came down pop back up but here's it had earnings the other day. So obviously I think people still like Microsoft still in an uptrend. So keep an eye on Microsoft. Let's see what else we have here. Intel Intel look like it was starting to break out, but then it just crapped out hitting hitting lows here. Close to $46 a share. I'm not an I'm not an Intel. I'd rather play with AMD Nike. You know, these are I mean, talk about stalwart companies. Nike the biggest brand on the planet basically coming down. Lost $40 a share. You know, is it worth a buy here? Maybe maybe a nibble if you want to get long Nike maybe sell some deep out of the money puts if that's your thing. Keeping an eye on Nike Oracle Oracle, you know, been coming down. Not sure if it's the selling's done there yet. Let's see Cisco. Let's take a look at Walmart because I like to talk about Walmart. I love Walmart, too. Right. Look at that. I had drawn this line a long time ago right around 135 support line. Yesterday, Friday, January 28th, pop down below it when the early sell off and then finish on the high of the day around 137 and a half. So I like Walmart on the support around 135. Maybe nibble a little bit there if that's your thing with Walmart. Disney, same thing. Another institution. Everybody knows Disney. I've been buying Disney a little bit down here in the bottoms to, you know, eventually, Disney's going to go higher. Eventually, I'm nibbling down here a little. Got way oversold on the RSI. So that kind of gives me some some ammunition to nibble a little bit on the lows. And and you know, it's going to go higher at some point. So I nibble a little bit. That's what I'm doing. We looked at Tesla. The pharmaceuticals, you know, you'll see a lot of a lot of stocks sitting right on that 200 day moving average. This is Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers, Pfizer, Merck, you know, look at all the pharmaceuticals, Kellogg, Verizon. We've talked about Verizon before. Let's take a quick look at Verizon again. So Verizon been in this down trying to have been talking about Verizon. I use this as the example of waiting for it to bounce back to get in. Now Verizon been in this channel, came down, got even lower than the second channel down here, and then it popped and made this bull flag. And I talk about bull flags the bullish and it did pop up bullish, but it got knocked back down with the rest of the market. Although yesterday you can see right here closed on the highs of the day is is Verizon by here. I think it's I think we've I think Verizon sort of found the bottom here you can sort of look at this as a head and shoulders bottom.  I think if it gets back above $54, $55, you know Verizon should start to move higher again. So I'm keeping an eye on Verizon paypal. You know, I like the payment sectors paypal and square. This is PayPal you know getting hit with the rest of the market. Maybe we got some divergence here where you can see the price action still going lower, but yet the RSI sort of moving higher. You know, I'm not sure I'm ready to get in yet square. Same thing. I think square is a little weaker than paypal. Yeah, look how look at this. Just this constant and hit got below the 20 level on the RSI. So, you know, maybe square and PayPal are starting to find some bottoms here. Keep an eye on it. You don't have to try to pick the bottom and get the exact bottom so you can brag to all your friends. You probably want to wait for the price action to let you know it's time to get in. But this is, you know, what we can do is draw the channel here to kind of help, you know, you kind of connect you connect the tops, you connect some of the tops and you connect some of the bottoms. Kind of give you the visual of where the stock is to help you make that decision of when it may be time to get in. OK, so it's it's really down this bottom leg here. Got over so I think the next move should be back up towards the top of the channel. Now, whether it gets above it and out is is the big question. So it could pop above it and you think, OK, this is the start of the, you know, the move higher and then it hits the resistance here and then gets knocked back down again. What you want to do is you want to wait to see it pop out of the channel, have the sideways action and then start its move higher. So, you know, Square may not get back into that that sustained uptrend until it gets to maybe above $140 a share. It has to get outside of the downtrending channel, have some sideways actions and then move higher. Then you're sure that, OK, I'm getting in on a more bullish leg, a higher probability trade or else, you know, if you if you try to get in early, it could get knocked back down again. So I'd wait till it gets out of the channel, sideways action and then moves higher. That's the kind of things that I'm looking for. Lululemon, downtrend.  Costco, McDonald's. McDonald's still strong stock. Didn't get down to the 200 day, but look at the move higher. It was up over $7 a share. Pepsi, still good. Pepsi, let's take a look. Just nice, nice action, hugging along the 50 day moving average. Pepsi, looking good as a, you know, a price mover higher. This could have been an area to nibble on some shares. I think Pepsi is going to just keep moving higher. What else do we have? Home Depot had a good day yesterday. Twitter, people like to talk about Twitter. Let's see what Twitter looks like. Twitter is in the down move. Got the RSI and the lows again. You know, we could be, it could be trying to find a bottom here. Could be trying to find a bottom here. You want to pick bottoms? Eh, you know, maybe you could nibble a little bit. You know, I'm keeping an eye on Twitter. This could be the bottom and it could start to move higher from here. So just keep an eye on Twitter. It's had a nice pullback. You know, this could be a bargain for some of you if you haven't bought into Twitter yet. Um, what else? I don't like to Facebook. I'm not a fan. IBM, Google, Google's come down under the 200 day moving average as well. Keep an eye on Google. It may bounce back. So let's talk about the Bitcoin stocks, Riot and Mara. Bitcoin's been losing a lot of price action, too. So this is Riot coming down to getting kind of oversold, but it all depends on where Bitcoin goes. Let's look at Mara. Same thing. It's following Bitcoin down. I have no stake in either one of these. Just showing you just showing you these peloton. We know the story of peloton. Just crapped out. I mean, let's go back to the monthly so we can see where it where it had its IPO. The low of the IPO was under $20. This was what was the low here was $17.70. We're 25 and change. You know, maybe maybe I'm not even going to say by peloton. It's just the company who knows what's going to happen. I don't think it's even worth getting into. But, you know, keep a keep a watch on it. eBay still in this just moving down. Oh, so let's talk about Clark's because this is a position that I am in and I've talked about this before. I've been waiting for Clark's to finally break out of the sideways action. I had gotten in around $175, $176 a share, which was, I think I got in around here, went up to high 180s, thought I was doing pretty good, and then it just got crushed. It was some investment firms that downgraded the stock a little bit. So it dropped down to, you know, 165 or so. I'm holding at least, I think I got in at a good level. I'm holding, maybe I could have stopped out here, but I didn't buy too much. So I'm going to hold and see what happens. But Clark's unfortunately got knocked back down into this middle of this channel here. Hopefully it can find its way higher. All right, I think that's all for today. So the bottom line is here, you know, we're kind of in a holding pattern. Let's bring up the SPY one more time. We're kind of in a holding pattern here, churning down towards the bottom, just under the 200 day moving average. I'd like to see a continuation next week, but we could still be in for that watershed, big last one day down move. So I'm kind of holding tight. You know, you don't always have to have a conviction. You know, the market sometimes will tell you it's not ready to show you where it wants to go. So it's okay to sit on the sidelines. That's sort of where we are now with our newsletters and where I am personally, even though I've been buying little bits, little bits and pieces on the way down, just to say I can dollar cost average a little bit. But I'm waiting to see what the next action is here. Okay, you know, when you're in this channel, you have more conviction that you can make these trades with high probability that it's gonna keep moving in that direction. But now we've had the knock down, so we need to wait for it to find the bottom. I don't like to short, I don't take bearish positions all that often because I just, I don't do well with them. I can't make money enough on bearish positions. So I stick to the bullish positions and I wait, wait for the confirmation, all right? So that's all for your Saturday synopsis for today. Let's quickly take a look at our website. Give me a quick second. You go to our website, we have our free put-selling basics guide. Go to smartoptionseller.com, that's our website. Put-selling basics here along the top. This is what we do. We sell put options, we sell put option credit spreads, but come here, put your name and email address down at the bottom. We'll send you a free copy. That's what we do. Over here is our services tab. We have our newsletters. We sell put options, we sell put option credit spreads and we have our one-on-one coaching session.  We're having great success. We have taught a lot of students and you know, it's going real well with that. All right, so hopefully this video today has been helpful to you. Give me a thumbs up, leave me a comment. Don't forget to subscribe. Send me an email as well. I love hearing from you. All right, that's all for me today. I hope everyone has a great weekend and a great trading week ahead. This is Lee Lowell signing off.


For the rest of the story on the Alaba Fire, we need to talk about one other topic that generally gets overlooked. That is, the protocol that should be in place to deal with burn injury victims. Grant Gifford and Josh Lang were transported after the shelter deployment on the Alaba Fire to a small medical facility in Hot Spring, South Dakota. They were stabilized and then moved to a regional hospital in Rapid City where Josh was treated and released and Grant was checked in for observation. What happened next was the beginning of a tedious paperwork process and a long road to recovery. I knew that I had some second degree burns to my hands and leg and arm and some on my face and is what ended up, my left hand was true second degree and I actually had third degree on my right hand and I knew that my right hand was by far worse but that point in time I didn't really, to me everything was okay because I was alive and I was able to see my family. I wasn't really concerned about my burns. I knew that none of them were fatal and I was going to make it through it. Grant was at Rapid City Regional Hospital for four days battling a 104 degree temperature. He was assigned to a plastic surgeon to care for his burns. Then they released me and they want my wife to change my dressings and to breed me daily and we already have three kids and we're about ready to have our fourth child and to me that wasn't an option. So they set it up that our local family practitioner could debride my wounds and change me every day which was good because it was very painful and I don't know how to describe how much pain you get when somebody is scrubbing on your burns to try to clean up and then rewrap and took quite a bit of morphine every day to go through that process. About three weeks into it, every week, once a week I had an appointment with the plastic surgeon to check. My last appointment with him, when I arrived at his office my right hand had completely locked out. I could not move my right hand, not even wiggle my fingers. At that point in time I started to get pretty actively engaged in my own recovery and then he only spent about five minutes in the room and he left and we made the nurse bring him back in and I had some pretty specific questions for him that, you know, do I need to start physical therapy? No. I wanted to know when this wound was going to be healed and when I'd be able to go back to work and he kind of laughed at me and said maybe next year and he walked out of the room and at that point in time that's when I realized that this guy has no clue what I'm going through and doesn't know burns well enough to be treating me. I was afraid that if I wasn't having something done immediately on my right hand I may lose all movement of it for the rest of my life and that hit home pretty quick and at that point I called the forest FMO, Todd Pechota and told him what had happened and told him that I needed to get to a verified burn center. So the next day we left for Denver and once I got into the burn center there's several doctors there, you know, the primary surgeon and his residents and a specialized physical therapist that deals with burns on a daily basis and I spent about the next eight hours being evaluated and the physical therapist was, you know, torturous but she freed up my hand and the big concern was, you know, with the severity of the burn on top had I messed up tenons due to heat damage and that's what they were really evaluating is what was the internal damage to my hand from the burns and just getting it freed up and moving it again because, you know, three weeks they were both bandaged up, couldn't move them and that's the way they stayed. Another burn victim we talked to was Mariah Lucian. Mariah sustained burns when she was trying to outrun a rapid increase in fire behavior as her crew was burning out the top of a ridge line on the Po Cabin fire this last summer in Idaho. During her escape the fire crested the ridge and blew over her location. Mariah was transported with two other injured firefighters to the emergency room in Boise, Idaho. And then all this was blistered up and then there's a big blister here. It was basically all of this and up and along here and then all that was blisters.  I don't know how many times they did it for quite a while. They just popped and refilled until they were finally scrubbed down at Harborview. And you might just think well those are just blisters or get popped, heal up, no big deal.  They need to heal from the inside out. One of the reasons I wanted to get to a burn center so much was the fact that I'm an EMT and I know that at least that burns, you know, they're sterile for the first 24, 48, 72 hours after that the risk of infection is huge and you need to get treatment for them. You know I thought I could give the system a chance to let it work. I had originally when I was at Rapid City Regional the first time I talked to this plastic surgeon I asked about a burn center and he laughed at me and said that, you know, there's no burn center in the US that would take you. Well I learned otherwise from that. Talking with this burn surgeon he said, you know, if it's not bad enough to treat EMT we have outpatient therapy. We'll take care of you. He says I look at bad send burns. That's my job. Because it was three weeks after the fact. He told me that if I would have been there I probably would have had skin grafts done and been admitted right away to my right hand. In Mariah's case she was released from the emergency room and flown to her family in Spokane, Washington. The doctor admitted he released me from the emergency room on the condition that I sought to see a burn center in two days. So from there my primary objective was I wanted to go home and see my family. What I thought about that night, I guess I thought that the forest, I guess I was kind of naive in the process that I thought the forest was going to, it would be covered. Everything would just go smoothly. It's not exactly a smooth process at all. Generally taking into the fact that OWCP and the U.S. Forest Service and all this is a separate thing that works separate and it wouldn't be a smooth process going through it. I pretty much figured that all the paperwork would be, you know, I wouldn't have to deal with any of that stuff. I'd go to the burn center and do it, you do it the burn center. You wouldn't have to deal with it. I pretty much figured that, and there is a Forest Service liaison for this stuff, but I basically, she gave me the OWCP name, representative name, and I went and I basically did all the phone calling and all the groundwork to get myself to that burn center. Whereas it seems like the two, you're the person that's hurt, you shouldn't be doing that stuff. You're supposed to be recovering and going through mentally and emotionally physically what you need to heal, not going through paperwork. So I guess I figured that all that stuff was handled and in no way it was. Amount of paperwork, like I say in the National CA-1, CA-16, the referral to the Denver Burn Center, and then you're talking about travel to and from having to write down your travel voucher, medical expenses. Here you are driving from Custer to Denver now, and your bandage is leaking and you've got to change them. You've got to buy bandages. So you've got to keep all these receipts, keep the miles on your personal vehicle, motel receipts, food bills, everything has to go back in just to fill out, just like typical travel assignment with going to a fire. So all that paperwork's there. The OWCP claim number, your file claim number. You've got to have it when you check in at the Burn Center. You're going to have to have it when you get prescription medication and documentation of what the prescription was, what doctor assigned it to you. I found out in the latter part that held back part of my travel voucher. I was told that I was cleared to travel under 500 miles to the Denver Burn Center and then my travel voucher was denied. They said, well, you traveled outside the 500 miles, which wasn't true. It was 483 miles from my address to the front door of the Burn Center. But all this stuff, it's just this huge sinkhole, it seems like, that you get buried under. And then after three or four months, in comes all the medical bills that you thought these hospitals were sending it to OWCP. I don't know. I get a letter from Blue Cross insurance telling me, hey, were you injured at work on this or what? Do we need to pay the claim? Because they had already submitted it to my personal insurance. And then you get to hospital bills looking for you to come pay the bill. The radiology bill, the ER bill in Hot Springs, the ER bill at Rapid City, the hospital stay, the plastic surgeon appointments, the doctors that were changing my bandages and custer, everybody's billing you. The Burn Center is billing you. And just knowing what avenue to take with all those bills and who to fax it to with your clean number and say, hey, this is your guys' deal. You take care of it.  And that's where, as an agency, we need to ensure that person has a point of contact and they stay on top of the bills. You know, why should somebody that's been burnt, that's trying to recover, have to be dealing with that? Getting an injured firefighter to a qualified burn center is fairly simple if the request comes from the emergency room attending physician. The transfer and transport are included in the initial emergency care. But if the patient is released from the emergency room, the process can get a little more complicated. One of the four programs administered by the Department of Labor's Responses of Workers' Compensation, or OWCP, is the Federal Employees' Compensation Program. When a federal employee gets injured on the job, this is the program that provides workers' compensation coverage for lost wages, medical care, and rehabilitation assistance. Now, as valuable as this program is, it is at this point that an agency can really help an injured firefighter by assigning someone to help the firefighter deal with this paperwork process. It's important to understand the OWCP process and how it's supposed to work. To help us explain this, we talked to Karen Nichols, a human resource specialist from the National Interagency Fire Center. A COMP coordinator should always be involved in your OWCP claim. They will facilitate getting that paperwork to OWCP. They can answer a lot of your questions that you may have, and they can assist you in the process that is required by OWCP. However, ultimately, it is always the employee's responsibility to ensure these things are done and to provide the required information. If once you've been released from the emergency room physician and you require follow-up care for your injury, you should go to a primary care physician and be referred to whatever specialist you need to be seen by. If the emergency room physician refers you to a specialist, that is all that's necessary. The best-case scenario would be you have a serious burn injury, you go to the emergency room, they recognize that this is a serious burn injury. They refer you to the burn center and you continue treatment. It's from there. That is all covered under the initial CA-16 and you would still do your follow-up with whoever is designated as your primary care physician. But those medical expenses would be covered straight from the time you went to the emergency room all the way through. Recovery. In the case of Mariah, she was released from the Boise ER under the condition that she would see a burn center within 48 hours. Because she was officially released, she was now unknowingly required under the OWCP process to get a referral from a primary care physician. This was Tuesday night, so Wednesday and Thursday. Thursday I got the OWCP claim number and called that rep.  I really don't have a primary care doctor because I live in two to three places during the year. We spent the entire morning on the phone trying to find a primary care physician that would want to see me because I wasn't a regular there. I wasn't exactly content with that because I was supposed to be seeing the burn center today. I didn't know how far this was going to be drug out and I'm going to see the primary care doctor on Friday. We got a week in coming up. I didn't know how they operated. I'm seeing eventually seeing the burn center on Monday or Tuesday of the following week. I wasn't really going to have any of that. My dad and I went up to the medical clinic and basically told them that if there was someone worse off than me that they could treat them, but we weren't leaving until they treated me. We filled out the paperwork and within 15 minutes the doctor was looking at me and the silly part is he looked at me and he said he didn't have any experience with burns that he was calling Harborview. He called Harborview five minutes later. He came back and said the Harborview wanted to see me and they wanted to see me tonight. Another avenue for assistance comes from a nonprofit organization called the Wildland Firefighters Foundation. Their main focus is to help families of fallen firefighters and assist firefighters and their families when they are injured. Where we've been able to intervene is to get families to the bedside, into the burn centers, into the hospitals. We have been able to educate some of the Forest Service staff on the intensity of the burns where they need to make decisions to help support get those kids to the burn centers. We've been able to get money to those families. We've been able to fly families and firefighters immediately. We make that stuff happen immediately. From that point we called Wildland Firefighter Foundation and Vicki had a ticket in two and a half hours to Seattle and we were admitted within five minutes at Harborview and the care at the burn center was phenomenal compared to Boise ER or the primary care place. I had a chest X-ray within two minutes and residents and doctors all around me helping me out. By 11 o'clock that night they had me drugged up and scrubbing down and debraiding all my blisters. The other thing is, is the avenue out there, Vicki, called the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. There's a ton of support there that she has that we don't. Just in supporting you with travel to actual, in my case I had to call her and get advice about OWCP and she has lawyers on retainer that know the system in and out and were able to advise me on what path I needed to take to get some of this cleared up. As a supervisor if I had somebody burn that's the first call I'm making to get done with our agency administrator is to Vicki because I know she'll be there to support the families on the other side of the table not just the firefighter. It is our hope that listening to this section has enticed you to look into your agency's protocol when dealing with a firefighter that has experienced a burn injury. Burns are different and we need to see to it that these injuries are handled by true specialists. It is also important, before an injury occurs that we have identified who the compensation claims specialist is on our local units that can help these firefighters through the process immediately after the injury and all the way through the recovery process. Burns are completely different. They can't be treated to level one trauma center or locally. They don't have the knowledge or the tool skill set. To me that speaks of itself. You can go anywhere in the U.S. and you're not going to get the treatment that you need for burns other than a verified burn center. Until we realize that we're going to have people that leave an E.R. because some doctor doesn't think that they're critical and it's going to cause them to have a longer road of recovery.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com coming at you with another first edition box, Bowman Baseball. I think Bowman Baseball officially drops later this May, so keep an eye on jaspyscasebrakes.com for that. Remember, 15 sold before 14, so now we're doing 14 right here. Thanks everyone for getting in. Kind of spoiled. We're watching a replay of an MLB network of Phillies that met. They're tied at zero, bottom of the tenth. And it says in the bottom left-hand corner, Brandon Nemo, walk off home. Kind of spoiled as I feel like. Where's the mystery? You would have to think, hey, if they're replaying this game, it must be important. Something must have happened. Keep people's eyes on the TV. Now I know what happens. Hopefully the packaging for Bowman Baseball will be a little bit better than this, otherwise those case breaks are going to be going to take forever. What's up, TJ? What's going on? Nice, Rex. Congrats. Jack, what's going on? At the risk of sounding old, what were you listening to? Actually, did it sound like a modern song to you? The song that I was playing before I started this break was by an English band that was very popular over there. It's not as popular over here. The Stone Roses. 80s kind of new wave group, sort of in the vein of this new order, but with a little more less techno and more like psychedelic kind of jams. That's called Fool's Gold by the Stone Roses. Let's go. We've got Nick Madrigal to 150, and Drew Mendoza for the Nats, John Samuelson, and the Nick Madrigal will go to the White Sox, Chris Whitney. This is Isaac Peretti's for the Tigers. That'll be for Chris. I do like the roots. I couldn't tell you specific songs by them, to be honest with you, but as I appreciate them as excellent musicians, was Jonathan India. Is this called Foil or is it Sky Blue? I don't know what they call this, but I've just been calling it Foil. I'm sure there's a specific name for this. But that goes to the Reds, Gary Prescott. Reese Hines, another one for Gary and the Reds. Sky Blue Foil, says Cooper and Zach, got it. I do, Jay. I play the geek. I could play a little bass geek, a little keyboard, although I've lost a lot of piano skills over the years. I could play the, I haven't done so in a long time, but I've been classically trained in the old clarinet. It's pretty good. It's Forteus Nova, Astros EA. Wait for, you got to watch out for Joe Jaspi's summer concert series. That might happen someday. It was Bobby Dalbeck for the Red Sox, Derek Mackenzie, and there's Eric Pardino, who I think was a Brazilian kid signed by the Blue Jays when he was like 15 years old or something like that. Davey for the national team, 15 years old, but yeah, there you go. That's right, Mac McCarthy, with a lot of people being quarantined and no live music. There's the Brandonimo walk-off, there's Jason Dominguez, Brady McConnell, all sorts of stuff happening here in this stack. Brady McConnell for the Royals goes to Aaron Tully. We've got Miguel Amaya for the Cubs, that'll be for Matt Gomes, and of course there's the Martian, Jason Dominguez, Martian, there he is, there you go. That's for Aaron Tully. He had a nice couple of boxes here, nice couple of first edition boxes for him. He pulled a sky blue foil of his in the previous box. Josh Proust and the twins. What would I charge for the Joe Jaspi summer concert series? I would only charge, the only thing I would charge is your attention. How did I forget this guy? It's Bobby with Junior too. Man, now people think I was trying to Brandon Cook's, I was not trying to Brandon Cook's anybody, Aaron Tully. Here's Bobby with Junior to 75, nice. Yeah, the only thing I would charge, Matt McCarthy, I would charge your attention. Your time would be the only fee you would have to pay for the Joe Jaspi concert series, there's Bryce Tourang for EA, who knows when that's gonna happen, maybe a month or so, I don't know. Stay tuned, ladies and gentlemen. Helio Ramos to 150, Keoni Cavaco, and that is break number 14, first edition 14. All right, I need a better manager. No, I think I'm okay.  All right, this is for the break credit. If you bought two teams, you get one entry. If you're like Johnny, you bought six teams, divide that in half, three entries. Chris Garosi, Chris Whitney, Darren McKenzie, EA got two, that's an entry. Gary, Josh, Justin, and Matt got three, but only two counts, so that's one entry. Just quickly spot check this again here. All right, so one and 12 chance to win $100 of break credit from this box. Let's roll it, let's randomize it 12 times. Six and a six, and 12th and final time after 12. Congrats to Gary Prescott, $100 of break credit going your way. Thanks for watching, everybody. I'm Joe. I'll see you for the next one. Bye-bye.