Live Day Trading: Stocks, Options Strategies and Market Analysis $SPY

Happy new year everyone. It is our last live event of the year and appropriately I'm going to be enjoying a porter here. This is the Edmund Fitzgerald and I may even have another. Harry, happy new year. How are you doing? — Happy New Year to you, Pete. I'm drinking coffee. I'll probably hit something a little harder later on. Don't forget I'm 3 hours earlier out here. — Any uh big celebration planned for tonight? — Oh, uh no. I mean, I got a you know, with my uh my six-year-old, so the stuff that we do uh with six-year-olds on New Year's probably going to go off. Sebast Sebastian, you and he are going to be gaming for sure. — Mhm. We definitely will. He got his new PlayStation for um for Christmas. Uh and all of a sudden the Xbox has been pushed to the side and now he just wants to play PlayStation. So, — well, that sounds like a fun night. Yes. Uh, it'll probably be pretty relaxing on my end and uh just going to spend a quiet evening and hope that I can make it up at least till the New York ball drops. — So, the year in review, it has been a very interesting year and it sets up uniquely for next year. So, uh, welcome everyone. I hope you had a good year. Uh, lots of lessons learned. Uh thank you for those of you who have posted to uh the Reddit sub. Been some really great lessons and uh we're going to take a look at that and one of you is going to get a free quarter to the chat room and I hope to do more of these giveaways through the course of the year as well. So just to take a look at what the market is doing right now. We've got uh this is a daily chart. We've got a little bit of a pullback. You can see how the market tried to get through that all-time high last week and it has backed off. So, that is a bit of a failed breakout. The more interesting chart that I've been looking at is for QQQ. And there we can see this is a well-defined lower high double top as far as I'm concerned. And now you can see how the market was not able to get back to even that recent high. Not even talking the high of the year. So we have a downward sloping trend line with three touches. We have QQQ below AVWAP Q and touching the 50-day moving average. So uh tech stocks have been weak. We've seen that in the price action over the course of the last two months or so. And without tech stocks, the market's going to have a very difficult time rallying in my opinion. How what's your opinion, Harry? I think you've been a bit more bearish than I have. I have uh for some time obviously. Um I mean, first if we go back on year review, SPY went up 17% in 2025, right? So it ended uh almost it started 2025 100 points lower than it is. QQQ performed a little bit better going up around 22. Sorry about that everyone. Uh so as I was saying, SPY up 17% on the year. QQQ up 22%. U obviously what is stands out for me for this year is liberation day right where you have what if you zoom out on the chart it almost looks like a mini black swan event right so you have this huge dip into going into March and then you know obviously the April event um which we rebound off of uh and then we don't stop until we get to uh

October. And in October, if you look at uh end of October, SPY is at 687. Right now, SPY is at 685. So that is two straight months of no movement. So you have SPY, which has gone up to give you an indication of just how bullish some of these markets have been in 2025. You have twomonth period here of no movement. All right. Uh and then you have that huge drop in April and yet the entire index still manages up uh 17%. Now we can talk about the larger macro. You know, are we going is this year 2000 again? Are we going to be in store for 13 straight years of flat market? That that's a separate discussion. But just in terms of the price action, the time period from um uh middle of April all the way up to October, end of October is one of the more extraordinary bullish runs that I've seen in this market. Yeah. The fact that the market has not been able to rally in November and December is it's not bearish, it just less bullish for sure. And uh so we take a look at uh what happens in the last week, the Santa Claus rally. When the market does have a Santa Claus rally, the returns for the following year tend to be about 10%. But we don't have the Santa Claus rally. They're somewhere around 6%. So this is back to 1950. So that gives you a little bit of an idea. And typically when the market can't rally and it should rally and it's supposed to rally at a time when asset managers have disincentive to sell. See selling pressure tells me that there's some pressure out there. And so from an economic standpoint, uh, the numbers have been coming in good. We've got GDP at 4. 3% growth. Can we trust it? We had the government shutdown. The numbers have been out of whack all year. The employment numbers, the BLS, I don't trust that for anything right now. I mean, they lopped a million jobs off of the 2024 employment figures. And back in August and September, we had all sorts of backward revisions. So, labor scene, uh, we had a really good initial jobless claims number this morning as well. I don't know that we can trust it because it also contradicts what ADP and Challenger Gray and Christmas, two private firms that gauge employment, what they've been saying, and the household survey hasn't matched with the government's numbers. So, who knows what the true employment scene is. I know that valuations right now, they're lofty. They're at about 23. Uh, at the peak of the dot bubble, they were at uh forward PE of about 24. So, prices are pretty expensive. They were expensive a year ago. So, they were kind of at the same level a year ago. And the market still managed to ek out a gain. got a fairly hawkish Fed right now. Who knows? Will uh Trump put someone in place that's more dovish perhaps? But there's still a larger looming problem. And that is that TLT has been selling off, which means that interest rates are moving higher. And you can see how TLT has broken below on a D1 basis all of the major moving averages and it is staying below them. How can this be? The Fed just cut three times. The Fed can't control the long end of the yield curve. What we're seeing is selling from Japan and China. They have their own woes. They need the money. They're selling US treasuries. And that downward pressure is causing interest rates to stay elevated and that impacts consumption impacts uh interest rates for homes. Yep. Cars. I think you're right about TLT. I mean TLT for those who don't know that monitors the 10 year. It's the bond market there. And one thing we saw on Liberation Day was the bond market can still wield incredible power. If anything made the administration back off some of the more worrisome uh numbers that were out there, it was the shock that the bond market sent um through, you know, through the world. And the bond market, as for those who don't know, is um around three times bigger than the entire stock market is.

So um the bond market still wields enough power to make sure things don't get too out of hand. I agree with you. Look, I've never really trusted the government numbers, but sometimes it's just it's so agree. I mean, the CPI was so egregious at 2. 7% when you left out all those categories, but not only that, but you plug a zero uh into categories, you leave out, which is just a statistical no. Um the the more interesting thing to me was it was so blatant and so obvious that uh the CPI number was um was uh manipulated to be lower but that the market didn't care. Um you know the market just said you know what we're clearly asset managers and institutions are going along for this ride. They're expecting a doubbish uh Fed share to come in. They're expecting lower interest rates and they're kind of kicking the can down the road. Do they know that might lead to higher inflation and so on? Probably. I'm sure they do. These people all graduated college. Um but uh they don't care at the moment. There'll be time enough to sell uh later on is it seems to be the uh the mantra here. Get in while the getting's good. Um, but you're right, there has been in the last two months, uh, there's some stalling going on. That may have to do with valuations. It with, do I really want to buy, uh, some of these stocks at these prices, but we got to go with the price action. And the price action, to be honest, has been crap the last few months. It really has been. And we're getting a lot of questions here about swing trading. Uh, and that's really day trading. the price action can, you know, you can go either way on day trading. You're going to be in and out. You're out at the end of the day, done. But if you're talking about swing trading, that's where this last two months really kick in because if you don't have a market direction, it's certainly not one that you can trust. Very hard to carry some of these swing trades over. Uh right now I have a limit order in to sell futures at 6925. Let's take a look at the market. Why do I like that level? Well, first of all, that would put me right about the halfway point of this long red candle. Coming into the day, uh we had a breakdown below a wedge formation that I'm going to show you shortly. We had nice stacked red candles early in the day and a nice long green candle. In the chat room, I had mentioned to everyone this morning, I said if this green candle is retraced, if we fail the VWAP breakout with ease, this is going to be a downward sloping trading channel. That's exactly what we got. There we go. And on this bullish cross down in here, I said this is where you want to be watching for a bounce. If you happen to take any longs earlier in the day, when we get this bounce, we're looking for the bounce to stall. have mixed over overlapping candles. Why? Because that tells us that the trend, the bounce is not strong. There's plenty of retracement. We got the stall below VWAP. Didn't get the trade off uh when before we had this long red candle. So now that I've got that breakdown, I've got a limit order up here. If I get filled, great. If I don't, so be it. It's the last trading day of the year. I'm not going to chase anything. I have to be able to enter on my own terms. Let's zoom out very quickly and I'll show you what I was looking at yesterday. Posted this in the chat room. We have a longer term wedge pattern that was broken. And if you take these lows right in here and you connect these highs right in here, that was the wedge and we pretty much closed right at it. This morning we broke right below that wedge. We had a bearish 10 cycle and we had that price action that I had referenced earlier. That to me was all bearish. So hopefully I'll get filled in here on this little bit of a bounce. No reason to chase anything today. I did also try a long today. Uh I bought Vonda and the reason that I got long was even with the market pulling back. The stock had a beautiful big gap up on major news and it had held its gains while the market was pulling back. I had an entry at $9. 35 getting ready for the live event. So I just put in and you know it went up to about 955. I just put a stop in at 9:35. If I scratched that was fine. You can

see how the stock has pulled back. But this might be one to watch in the future. I maybe as most viewers probably know I'm doing the small market challenge. Uh small market funny small account challenge. Um, and uh I don't know why because it's a pain in the ass, but uh we're up I'm up did one trade, made around $280 on the trade. Um the accounts at $2,875. We started around 2500ish somewhere around there. Uh and I'm looking right now at what my next trade might be. And despite the market being down, I do like the intraday and the daily on Nvidia right now. Um I still like Nike by the way, but that 50 SMA is looming right above. So Nvidia, if it can pop above VWOP here, if you look at the daily chart on it, we have uh the lows came in middle of December. It looked fairly bearish at that point. It broke below the 50, broke below the 100. Been on a decent upward trend here uh the last week or two. Finally breaking through the SMA50 on the daily and now just kind of hanging around there. But clearly uh the SMA50 is holding. So we have decent support here at 18641. Um and today we're showing some pretty good relative strength. I'd like to see it hold over VWAP. If it can do that, I would consider swinging it uh long uh going into uh New Year's. But uh right now, that would be the one stock that I'm looking at. So, we do have some questions here. Uh my son, no, he hasn't been trading. He's obviously um he's on winter break now, but he'll start trading again, I'm sure, next summer, but he's focused at Berkeley on school at the moment. I think he just takes his money and uh he put it into some stocks and just holding it uh until next summer. — Wait a minute. He's got a girlfriend, right? So, I know where his money is going. is going. — Yeah. Well, exactly. No comment there. Uh uh any advice on taking very short-term swing trades? A couple of swing trades so we can cover them all. Buy near the close, hold overnight. Someone else wrote, "Any advice of Matt? " Again, same thing. Uh can only day trade in the PM. Can we just find strong stocks, use alerts and buy dips, short bounces on the M5, market permitting? And then um is swing trade viable uh during the 6:30 7:30 a. m. or 12 pm uh PST open and closing times. I mean it for me the best time to take a swing trade is usually towards the close of the market. Um you get to see how the stock performed during the day. you get to see how it's closing, particularly if it's closing over any major levels of support or under resistance on the daily chart. Um, you get a really good look at how the market performed during the day and how the stock responded to the market. So, for example, if I were to take Nvidia, it would be towards the end of the day. I'd be able to see, is it closing over VWAP? Did it close strong? Did the market close? uh if the market started dropping and Nvidia held its own, all those would be uh pretty good signs for me. So, I mean, you could take a swing trade at any time. A lot of times uh day trades turn into swing trades, but if you're specifically asking about swing trading, my favorite time to take a swing trade is towards the end of the day. What about you, Pete? — Yeah, I agree with that. You want to be able to see how the stock has performed. You want as much information as you can possibly can get. By the afternoon things start to settle down. Oftentimes the early look on the stock changes. So uh yeah, afternoon is when I like to enter swing trades. Can you trade on a swing basis uh only looking at segments of the market like snapshots of it later in the day? Absolutely. And uh that's what most of you should be doing. So everything that you do on a swing trading basis is going to be dictated by market conditions. And so a good example of that is the rally that we had in the back half of the year. Harriet already mentioned how lackluster it was. We had just these tiny compressed ranges and when we did get movement it was blam, one and done and then we would recover. Lots of choppy price action. So the point is that this rally was not particularly strong.

This is a great time on any market dip to sell bullish put spreads. And that is a great strategy when you have a an upward market trend. Doesn't have to be a strong trend. Can be a choppy one. And then you're entering those trades, distancing yourself from the action, placing your stop below major technical support, which the short strike price has to be below that short uh below that support level. So in this case, you have the 50-day moving average for the market. You're evaluating the market, and you're evaluating the stock. You got the 100 day moving average for the market. You'd be looking for those technical support levels, and you want to sell your short strike below that technical support. on the notion that buyers have been there. Buyers are going to support that stock. That increases our probability and our odds of success along with the distance of the current price. That also increases our probability of success. And then finally, we're taking advantage of accelerated time premium decay. So those are the types of trades in this type of market condition that you can take on a swing basis. very low maintenance. Don't set a stop order. Identify a critical price point that you believe will not be breached. Set an alert. And oftentimes when the market pulls back or the stock pulls back to the support level, it'll poke at it a couple of times, but especially if that move has been fast and furious and you're not too far from expiration, you're going to get a bounce because the market doesn't go straight down and stocks don't go straight down. So, do not panic. Set your alert. Proactively manage the trade. If it's a uh market related drop, by the way, I tend to not stop out the trade right away, especially if the market's been an up an uptrend because those big violent moves like this, we've seen them particularly around options expiration and they're trying to flush everybody out. So, if it's market related move lower in the stock, I pay less attention to it than if it is a stock related move, meaning the stock is pulling back. It's lost its relative strength. It is weak relative to the market. The market's been flat to higher and the stock is pulling back. That's a little bit more concerning to me. And I did have that issue actually happen on a Microsoft bullish put spread that I sold earlier in the year. Stock was breaking down. So, it was showing relative weakness. I had to respect that. Great strategy and very low maintenance. put it on, set your alert, let time premium decay do the rest for you. And then for swing trading, when we're in a go- go bullish market, — we can buy longer term calls. We just don't have that right now. saying audio fixed. — It says the audio talk about — Okay, I am going to give you my uh bullish pick and it is AMD and I like AMD. Harry just gave you Nvidia. kind of my theory on all of this is if you're in the California gold r gold rush and you're selling picks and axes, you should be able to make money. And right now, whether AI works or it doesn't work, the guys who are selling the picks and the axes are the ones making GPUs. And so their sales have been off the charts. If these stocks crack down, if these stocks break down, it is only going to happen with one heck of a lot of market selling pressure. So, what I like about AMD is I like this breakout here. I like the fact that there's horizontal support that also happens to line up with the 100 day moving average. And this morning I took a look and the January 16th 200 19550 bullish put spread was available for about uh 40 cents and let me take a look at it. Let's I still like selling premium. I'm not go gang buster bullish on the market right now. Uh, so I want to take advantage of this strategy. And right now you can see that spread is 39 cents bid offered at 49 cents. It's going to expire in three weeks. So I'm actually taking risk for a shorter period of time. I'm willing to accept less than the 50 cents I would normally be looking for. I get 45 cents for this

spread. I would take that. I think that is a good riskreward ratio. You have horizontal support first level. Second level is the 100 day moving average. So those are the two support levels that I would be leaning on. Uh someone asked here what do I mean by spec trades? You see this mentioned in various places but don't really understand what they are when to use them. I mean a spec trade is just another way of a kind of a high-risk reward trade. Um, it could be anything from, you know, something just broke through uh the SMA, but you don't really have it confirmed, but you feel like it has all the indications, volume, everything suggesting that it's going to start a run. Um, so, you know, normally you'd wait, you'd wait for that support to develop. You'd wait for not support, you wait for the confirmation of that SMA break, but you jump in early. Um, those are spec trades. there. They kind of indicate a trade that might not have as much technical supporting evidence behind them, but there is a higher reward profile to it. So, you go for the trade. I wouldn't recommend those type of trades for people that are starting out. You're best just to kind of wait for trades that really uh really stand out. That's what I'm trying to do with this small account challenge, which is take very specific trades that have everything checked off on them. Does that mean it's going to be 100% win rate? No. But um to kind of give you an indication like for example, if I were to take Nvidia right now long, that would be a spec trade in a way. Why? Because it's still below VWOP. The market is weak. Nvidia, yes, it's strong today, but until I see it confirm above VWOP, it's not a safe trade. Is there a chance that if the market bounces, Nvidia right now will start going on a nice run, ending up, you know, somewhere on 190 and I could catch that run if I went long right now? Yes. But unless I see it break VWOP and confirm above VWOP, it is a spec trade. So, that that's kind of how you know you can define it. expect trades are a little bit more um risky. Um what are our thoughts Pete on basic on trading material related stocks in 2026? Basic Matt. I mean, I don't really have sector thoughts maybe other than tech. Um, basic Matt this last year has um I mean it's a decent uh decent sector, but I don't know. I'm not, you know, I'm not really in the business of trying to predict how a sector is going to do year-over-year. Yes, we're relatively short-term traders. So, I think that uh those stocks actually do look pretty good to me. And uh CLF is one that I'm long. I'm long at about 1425. And I like that stock. I like the price action in it, but it's, you know, it's a little bit flat right now. So, longer term, I like the fact that it's been able to grind its way higher. uh policy right now should help an iron ore producer in the US. I'm also long BTU price action again. I like the price action on it. And uh I'm long BTU at $3020. That was in my last Sunday video that I did about a week and a half ago. And I'm looking to exit around 3120 or so. I've got the 50-day moving average. I have AVAB E below. So, I like this move higher. Right now with the data centers, they require an incredible amount of energy and you're going to see a lot of coal producing power plants fired back up. We're already seeing that. By the way, I canled my short order on ES. So, I don't have an order working right now, and I'll explain why in just a second to finish up on basic materials. Uh I do feel that there's a good chance for them to gradually grind higher. I think utility stocks could actually do pretty well also for the same reason and that is that uh these data centers and that's a huge growth area. They require an incredible amount of power and energy. We got some really good uh articles that people posted about the year and review. Um, a lot of them are mindset focused as you probably expect that they would be. Uh, one stands out to me from uh, Raymond 99999. Um, and Raymond talks about how went

through the entire process, studied the system, two years, read the wiki, read everything, um, hit the benchmark, 75% win rate, 2. 0 into a profit factor, traded one share for three months and then decided in April, a fun month to try that in uh to go full size. And of course, uh what happened was there's this sort of psychological shift that occurs when you go from paper trading, you're trading one share to trading full size. And that shift is you go from a learning mentality. I'm doing this to learn and mistakes aren't actually that bad. Why? Because not costing you really anything. So mistakes actually are a good opportunity to journal them and learn and figure out uh what I did wrong and how to improve it. All of a sudden when you go full size, your focus becomes on that P& L. how much money am I making? And that's where things can start to get screwy. You start to feel this sense of urgency. If you get a loss, you feel like you have to make it back. You start to gamble a bit more. You start to lean into scalping a bit more. And that's exactly what this person did. They, you know, they kind of lost their way and chase that P& L with uh some bad decisions, with gambling, with um doing a lot of scalping. And then of course eventually what happens is that uh you get this one position where you're way over leveraged and the position just sinks you right. And so all of their gains they went from a huge gain for that year down uh to in one day wiped it out and wound up down year to date. Um the important thing though is this person usually when someone hits that point they throw their hands up and they watch all their hard work go out the window. they realize, I've been trying this for all this time and I have nothing to show for it. And that's when they just say, "Screw it. I'm out. I'm done. " Um, and usually they blame the it's the market's fault and they're all against me and conspiracy and blah blah. This person, on the other hand, uh, recognize what they did, uh, were able to have that kind of, uh, self-reflection and know going forward to now, okay, I need to go back to the basics and correct for this. So, um, great job there. But I imagine that resonates with a lot of traders. It does. And when I read that, uh, I looked at the S& P and I mean, I as traders, we can pretty much recall what happened throughout the course of the entire year. And the temptation to trade S& P futures was high right here because we had some nice decent downward movement. We had long green candles, long red candles. Those are trend days, lots of implied volatility. You can scalp in and out of those. And one of the problems is that during a trend day like that is a lot of traders will scalp in and out. Those are days you should be holding and adding actually. So, uh, you might look at the end of the day and go, "That was an awesome day. I want to do that again and again, but you don't even realize that you probably missed the majority of the move because you were in and out. You should have stayed and add it. " But anyway, so when we have lots of uh volatility, lots of mixed overlapping candles, long candles, big moves, yeah, that's when you can trade S& P futures effectively. The other time is when you do have that rare trend day, we get those less than 20% of the time. That's when you'll see me more active in trading ES futures. So uh if you try to force ES trades during suboptimal conditions, range days, inside days, choppy back and forth days, those are all programmed driven, they will chew you up and spit you out. But if you stick with individual stocks that have relative strength, heavy volume breakouts, you're going to have a huge edge. So that that's basically how the system is designed to work. There are moments where we can trade futures, but they are few and far between. It's not something I would do every single day. Another question here on how does the market typically uh open in the new year? Um, well, going back to 2021, uh, four of the last, well, I mean

three of them you pretty much dropped on the first trading day of the year and one it kind of just went up maybe at 50 60 cents. Um, you know, recent history would suggest that uh the first day of the new year generally tends to be a bit bearish. Um, but particularly if the last day of the year was bearish. So, guntohead, how is trading going to reopen on Friday, I'd probably say it will be bearish. But, um, this market hasn't exactly followed typical rules. But, if we're going to only use history to go off of, I would say you can pro probably expect a down day on Friday, which is another thing that might give me hesitation on swinging along like Nvidia. In fact, I might go back into Nike uh which is just powering right now. Uh even though we have that SMA, but I think Nike is about to or did uh break through here the SMA 6407 and it did. Yeah, it just broke through that SMA. So if Nike finishes above the 50 SMA, that is a beautiful long again. As the first five days in January goes go, so goes the month. As January goes, so goes the year. And this is historically proven out. Yel Hirs, Trader Almanac. Uh so January tends to be a fairly bullish month historically, but that's not something that you can come into and just take positions without watching price action. Price action drives everything. Every market is different. Seasonal patterns, sometimes they work great, sometimes they're not quite there. uh when you know the one seasonal pattern that I lean on and sometimes I get it and sometimes I don't is I absolutely love selloffs in August and September. When I get September, I am salivating because I know by midocctober, late October, I'm going to be buying into a year-end rally. And I will be aggressive. And I don't get that pullback. And I thought we would get one this year because we certainly had the negative data points to support a market pullback in August and September. In a in August in particular, this was August back in here. Uh, I think it was right around this level. Yep. Right in here. We had the Jackson Hole meeting, which didn't play out to be much of anything, but we had some weak employment numbers coming in, weak economic numbers coming in. Nobody knew if the Fed was going to cut rates in September or not. The table was set for a beautiful market pullback. When we didn't get one, it told me that we were going to muddle around and grind, grind higher and that the year-end rally was probably going to be a great big nothing burger, which is pretty much what happened. So, uh, in any event, don't go off of seasonal patterns, okay? Go off of price action. That's really all you should be depending on because as soon as you start to bring in outside influences, be they outside research, what other YouTubers are saying, what CNBC is saying, seasonal patterns, all of that junk only obscures and clouds what you're going to be doing in the overall market. It starts to impact you. It starts to influence you. and it shouldn't because price is really all that matters. — Matt asked, "Is it realistic to make a living day swing trading only? " If you look at my 2024 uh year where I made around 82% return that year about 90% of all my trades were swing trades. Um there was the occasional, you know, day trade in there, but almost all of them by and large were swing trades. So, if you took out the 10% with day trades, I still would have had a great uh a great year. It just kind of add a little extra on top. But, um yeah, you certainly can. You in fact um a majority of traders I would say are swing traders. Um and you know, you don't have the time to sit there and watch the charts. And you know, to be honest, swing trading is um uh in a way a lot easier, right? because you know you're taking a stock like let's for example you're looking at a stock like uh Nvidia you're not really paying much attention to the intraday you just have your end of the day condition set needs to close over VWAP needs to remain relatively strong

to the market because what you're really looking at is at the daily chart and you're looking at uh where that support is and if it stayed above it um and then you're going into your swing trade um and holding it overnight um you know The great thing about stocks that are if I were day trading right now that stock I mean the great thing about it is that's a stock that can turn into a swing trade right so if you go long Nvidia now and it starts performing well you can just hold it there's no reason to close it when it's uh doing what you want it to do and the daily chart still indicates a swing trade. So there's a obviously you get a little extra bonus but uh there's a lot of risks as everyone knows in day trading as well. you can, you know, you could go try scalping, you can try a lot of different things and they don't work. Whereas in swing trading, as long as you don't let it bleed you dry and that is really the, you know, just simplify the issue particularly on options is, you know, you go long, you buy a call for $6 and it goes up to $7 and you take profit. Great. So, you made a dollar, $100. uh a contract, but that same uh position, if it drops and it's down to $5, you generally won't go don't close it, right? Um and so what you wind up doing is either holding these options so they bleed you dry down to zero or you're closing them for much bigger losses than you're taking the gain on. Um so you just got to be careful on not letting the options draw, you know, bring you out. um when swing trading because they can just start dropping time decay and all that 50 60 cents a day, not enough for you to close it, but before you know it, you're now down a$150 on the option and you really need a big pop in the stock just to get back to even. Um, and then it gets to that point where the option's worth 50 60 cents and now you think, well, it's not even worth closing because if I close it and the thing pops and I would have, you know, it really that that's how people can lose money swing trading by letting the option bleed dry. So, you have to be pretty, you know, clear about where that support level is. If it crosses below it, you're going to close the option. You're not just going to sit around hoping it turns around. I just shorted futures at 6922 and I reloaded with another beer. So, I'm in very good shape right now. Why did I cancel that order back in here? What I wanted to see off of this long red candle was I wanted to see a very quick test with a long wick and a candle that closed near its low. If I saw one or two of those, that would show me that they tried to retrace that candle and they pounded it right back down. But I didn't get that type of price action, then I wanted to see some resistance because the S& P was hanging around that midpoint and there was a decent chance that it could challenge VWAP. That's currently my stop level right now. I believe that you're going to see the market kind of roll over, leak lower. I've got a bearish 10 cross. So, just giving you a little flavor on the trade that I've got on right now. I'll keep you apprised of uh what I do with that position. Uh making money a short of the micro futures on the the small market account small uh here because I think that's a very good short of futures at the moment. So, can you make money uh trading on a swing basis? Absolutely. But the beauty of it is you don't have to quit your full-time job. You can do swing trading. You can plan on putting in probably 10 to 15 hours a week on swing trading. You still have to do aftermarket analysis. You have to set alerts. You have to run your searches. You have to log in during the day to monitor your positions. May not take you more than a half an hour during the day. You have to be ready to enter trades. But absolutely and having the security of a full-time income will allow you to get your feet wet to experience a variety of different market conditions and uh hone your skills so you don't have to make that position. Yeah, I'm going pro today. You can hold off as long as possible. Ideally, you hold off for two, three, four years. Get your track record up. start really making some decent money and uh very viable. What was my most profitable stock of 2025? I I'd have to say Tesla. And believe it or not, on the short side, Tesla short probably was my most profitable uh trade trading uh position. So, um yeah, I'd say Tesla was probably it by far.

What anything any stock pop for you in 2025, Pete? — Not in particular. I haven't looked back at the beginning of the year because that's when I had my biggest winners was on the short side during that March uh April decline. Uh was also short futures in there. So, I had some really nice trades. Uh I had a couple of 100 point plus uh futures trading days and that's basis one contract which I trade more than that. So those are probably my uh most memorable uh trading days. The rest of the year I mean it uh the back half of the year from June until pretty much right now it's been premium selling and premium selling is like watching the paint dry. It is as boring as can possibly be. The only good thing about selling premium is that you'll live a very long life because it will take an eternity for those options to expire. At least it'll seem that way. And they will keep the premium into those options up until the very last moment. um a trade that I put on. It involves premium selling. That's a long out trade. I didn't post it but because it's an unusual trade, but I sold the 180 puts on Amazon for January 2027, so a year from now. And you get about $9 for those. Um, and on a 2:1 basis, I use that to So, if I sold um a 100 of those puts, I would then do 50 uh call debit spreads, 250 to 300 call debit spread, which you get for $15. So, um, selling the 2:1, I'm getting, uh, $18, uh, on the put selling at $15. So, I'm getting a $3 credit on that trade, right? Selling two to one on the 180 puts of January 2027 of Amazon and then the 250 to 300 call debit spread for a year from now. And so basically, obviously, if Amazon finishes over 300, I'm getting the full $18 of uh premium for every two puts that I sell there. And I'm getting the $35 in the call debit spread. So, I'm getting a around a $53 per contract uh total profit there if it finishes over 300. If it doesn't, if it finishes uh, you know, at 240 or 220, I'm still ahead because while I lose on the 250 to 300 call debit spread, it's more than covered by the puts. The only way I lose on this trade is if Amazon goes all the way down in 2027 to below 180. A lot of support has to be broken there. And uh, even then, I still own the stock at a cost basis of 171. So that is a long-term kind of premium selling but a little bit on the with some debit there uh trade that I put on separately as a long-term one-year out trade. I believe that this year uh you and I will probably both post uh more swing trades. I have been posting more swing trades and uh I enjoy doing them. You know, it all is dependent upon market conditions. The only time that I don't like entering swing trades is and why don't I show you a couple of instances and this is these are moments when you've got to keep your swing trading to a minimum. Focus on day trading. Uh one time period was back in here where you had these big whip saws. You don't want to be swing trading during those moments. And you oftentimes will see that when you have uh lots of long and green candles, that is a sign that the market is transitioning, particularly when you see them within a horizontal trading range. It could be transitioning to a trend reversal. So, this would be bearish. you could get a breakout to the upside, but on a swing basis, you don't really know. So, you want to kind of keep your swing trading to a minimum. Then, the other time that I don't like to swing trade is when I've had a nice run and I start getting these tiny bodied compressed candles near an all-time high. That is usually a sign that you're going to get a market dip. Now, you're still bullish because you've had

excellent price action, but you have to wait for that dip. So, in here, I'm taking profits on any swing trading gains, and I'm waiting, waiting. Maybe I get the drop here, maybe it comes up here, but when I get the drop, then depending on what that price action looks like, if it's fast and furious, it's just a one-off kind of event, you've got programs that are trying to flush traders out. So, they know where all the gamma squeezes are. see that a lot with zero DTE. I'm seeing it more frequently on the Friday expiration cycle. So, you get these big fat tail type of events to just flush out these traders and to force them to cover, but they're one and done. They're very brief. And so, if I see that type of price action, boy, I'm going to take advantage of that immediately. So, that's when I'm going to enter uh swing trades. But then you milk that run. Oh, you've got a marginal new high. You've got these tiny bodied candles. Take your gains. You know, you're that type of pattern is has been prevalent uh throughout most of the year. And uh we haven't really talked about uh next year too much, you know, and what we're kind of expecting. I did do a 2026 uh forecast for next year. So, uh, is there anything that you'd like to kind of start off that topic with, Harry? Um, uh, let me see here. Well, for 2026, I look, I do believe that there is a higher likelihood of a black swan event than in a typical year. Um, and it can come from a number of directions. There's just too many areas where whether it's private credit, whether it's real estate, whether it is the interest rates dropping, um whether you know it could be Taiwan, it could come from a number of places. There are just too many potential places that you could have that type of event. Then compare, you know, if you figure on any typical year, the odds of a black swan event is 10%. Right? There's about one every 10 years. So if this year if it you know if it's 20%. Um that's still more. Uh so that that's always going to that's in the back of my mind. I think though that what is going to be important to look for is this first quarter because if valuations are where they are and we saw this incredible runup there is a reason why between October and now the market has been kind of stagnant and that tells me that there's a lot that's now priced into this market. they're now already pricing in, you know, if we get a doubbish Fred uh hit coming in. It's not like that's not now priced into the market. Um the earnings of the all last the whole year's worth of that's all kind of priced in. Um so there's so much that is priced into this market at the moment. it may take more and I'm talking like an incredible earning season Q1 would do it uh to kind of supercharge things again. Um but you know I would probably guess that barring an amazing Q1 earning season, we'll see a fairly stagnant Q1 uh on the market. You had mentioned black swan events that in my 2026 forecast. One of the underlying themes was there are so many potential credit issues around the world. Japan, China, Russia, France, US. I mean it is a long list. So know that every year we are walking on thin ice. Okay? You don't want to predict that the sun is going to explode or that we're going to have a credit crisis because this charade can go on for a long time. But we also have issues on the consumer side from a credit standpoint. We've already seen some issues, subprime issues in the auto lending area. They have, any of you heard this? They're now coming out with 100month car loans. Oh my god. For a depreciating asset. Okay. Uh they're talking about 50-year home loans so that they can make housing more affordable. Uh Japan had already gone that route in the uh 1980s. They had generation loans that spanned

generations. That's not a good sign. That's not a healthy sign. Uh so the consumers in trouble. Baby boomers have very little saved. Uh there's larger wealth disparity with uh 12% of the population owning 88% of the market cap. Okay, that's not a good healthy sign. So the credit issues are looming. You look at states like California, states like Illinois, states that Harry and I happen to live in, it's not good. They are spending so much money and their structural debt issues are massive. So, the point that I'm making is that we've kicked the can down the road so long. Sooner or later, this is all going to manifest. The problem is that you have lots of gloom and doomers forecasting that it's going to happen tomorrow. And when tomorrow comes and there's no credit crisis, these same guys are out there next month. Oh, it's going to happen in six months. This time for sure. So, make sure that you don't listen to those guys. We have to watch what price action is doing. — That's it. — We don't haveions 82. Yeah, sure. I like that. Um, someone asked here, no, there is no algo line on uh Nvidia here that at the price point you're talking about. The two algo lines on Nvidia are the one coming off the top of 1124 connecting to uh 122 connecting to 128 connecting again to 1226. And that one comes in at 19420. And then the other one going a descending one from 1110 uh to 1226 and that one comes in at 19220. Uh so 194 19220 are the two um algo intersections on Nvidia. Uh any big plans of 2026 for one option or the podcast? Well, the podcast trade craft will be coming out in the beginning of January. I hope you all tune in for that. And I know Pete is working uh very diligently on his book. How's that going, Pete? — Book is going great. Uh, it's taken me a year longer to, uh, finish it than I thought it would. Uh, it's been a definite learning process for me. I had what I thought was a manuscript this summer. Uh, set it aside. Uh, re read the entire book in September and was not happy with it and decided to go back and rewrite most of it. So, I'm on the final chapter right now, which is good. I believe that uh by March, I will be doing a complete handoff with my editor, meaning it's going to publication. And uh so I don't know what that how long that process will be, but I would imagine sometime this summer it should be out. But uh that's been uh very tough, but it's exciting because I'm looking forward to it. I think it's going to benefit all of you. And uh as far as one option uh we had kind of a rough year because uh a year and two months ago my programmer of 15 years was drafted by the Ukrainian army. When I say draft drafted I use that term lightly. They knocked on his door and told him that he has 12 hours to get his affairs in order and I haven't heard from him since. So Dimma, I hope you are well. Um, so this year we've had to learn the source code and we currently have two programmers uh that we're working with that are very talented and we've actually been able to um do some version upgrades and to speed up uh Option Stalker Pro. So the chart loading speeds are great. We've got other uh ambitious projects that we're working on. We've got uh some server reconfiguration that we're going to do to further uh improve Option Stalker Pro. And then I've got some features that I've been looking forward to add. So, it's been a year tough year for us because we've been at a bit of a programming standill, but the table is set for 2026 to be quite awesome. Well, look at TLT, Pete. Look what it just did. Let's see. My futures position is up a little bit here and TLT is yeah starting to drop off a little bit. So that's a good sign. — And uh by the way uh Raymond uh congratulations. uh you got the most uh up votes and so uh you are going to have the chat room free for a quarter. So uh

and I will be doing more giveaways this uh upcoming year. So, they'll be either part of the live event, part of Harry's uh podcast, they could be uh related to my Sunday videos, but uh I want to give some free time away. And by all means, when you're getting free time uh with one option, make sure to read the system. You don't have to buy anything. Just make sure you read that because I think that content's going to help you. It uh complements the wiki very nicely which all of you uh hopefully have read. — Uh someone asked um uh basically selling calls against stocks that are assigned. Uh how often would you have to do that to make back your money? Uh stop doing the wheel. That's what you're doing. You're doing the wheel. You're selling puts. And if you get assigned, you're selling calls against that position to try to make up for it. Uh if you're going to sell a put, uh make sure it's for a stock that you don't mind owning at that price point. That's the idea behind it. Um if you're just going to keep chasing it by selling calls, um that's going to be difficult to do because you're going to have to sell calls that are far out of the money uh to make sure that you can keep doing it every week. Uh chances are your at the money calls are not going to be enough to cover whatever your loss was on the uh on the assignment. And then um you're gonna, you know, you're gonna get stuck. Uh particularly if the stock keeps dropping and you're selling all these out of the money calls and the stock's dropping. Sure, you're making back 20 30 cents uh a week on it, but until the stock bottoms out, um you're going to be chasing your tail. So really, if you, you know, if you're selling a put, you should plan on taking assignment of the stock, be happy with the premium, be happy with getting the stock at the lower price point. Um, just really people who try the wheel, they like the win rate on it because you're going to be successful more times than not, but it's that one time that you do it that um you're going to get caught. And don't forget that when you get really good premium for selling those puts, you're getting good premium for a reason. you're getting premium because the market makers think there's volatility there. And if you're doing the wheel on a stock with volatility, you're risking a strong drop that you're going to be chasing for a long time selling those calls. So, I would recommend not doing the wheel and just selling premium for stocks that you want to own, but happy to take the premium uh assign if you don't get assigned provided that the stock is not continuing to drift lower. You might even decide to sell some more put premium because you're scaling into a stock position. Again, if the stock did the unexpected and it absolutely plunged, uhoh. Well, now I've got a problem. I've got to question whether or not this was a stock that I really should have owned in the first place. Perhaps my original analysis flawed. And in that case, you would take your loss and move on. So yes, just selling premium against it is not going to provide you with much protection, especially if the stock is well below your strike price that you sold. But if it's right at the strike price and you can get some decent premium for it and you're indifferent about the stock, okay, fine. You then you can use that strategy and continue to generate income. Stocks I've been assigned on, I'm perfectly happy hanging on to. I will wait for a pop in the stock and if I feel that the stock is starting to hit resistance again, then I'll sell calls against it. But at that point, I'm really trading the stock and I'm not as concerned about selling premium, just watching what the stock is doing. So, let the stock be your guide. I did want to uh mention one thing here. Somebody had talked about selling iron condors earlier and how they were doing that successfully on the S& P 500. I've been doing this a long, long time. So, trust me when I tell you this because I've seen it happen time and time again across thousands of accounts is the reason that I don't like selling iron condors or delta neutral strategies, premium selling strategies, is because first of all, you don't have to be a pro at choosing market direction. You just throw this trade on, okay? You're just selling premium. There's no skill required in that. The skill actually to trading it successfully comes in when there are one or two moves per year where you have to make a decision and you don't know if you're going to have to buy the spread back in for a loss if that's the right decision or you don't know if you should not buy it back in

and the market's going to retrace. What happens is implied volatility and volatility in the market overall sooner or later it is going to come home to roost. It will strip you of everything that you've made. Again, I've seen this play out so many times. people that have sold iron condors for a year, two years, three years, even consistently making money month in, month out, beautiful mechanical, blow it up. You talk about disheartening. Wow. When you have something that's money, it is a cash machine, and you think you figured trading out and then all of a sudden you give everything back, let me tell you how disheartening that is. you are back to ground zero. So, I am not a favor of selling iron condors at all. The the big difference between selling iron condors is that you're going to be right the majority of the time versus directional trading. The big difference is that when you're a directional trader, you need to know when to lay off, when to hold back, when your probability is not high. And then when you do get those higher probabilities, you need to be able to scale up and hit hard and swing hard. Okay? So there's a pretty big difference between the two different trading styles. That's the difference. Um the bracketed butterflies are not considered uh delta neutral. They're actually um banking on a outsized move in one direction or another. They're generally an earnings type play. Um, I don't want a delta neutral result there. I'm looking for, you know, the tail end of the curve on either uh either side. So, um, all right. I think that might cover it for the year. Wow. Well, thank you everyone for attending uh the last live event of the year. I'll give you my marching orders for my ES trade. I'm going to be using VWAP as my stop. Actually, the top of this long green candle, that'll be my stop below VWAP. I don't want to go back there. I want to see the market continue to have these mixed overlapping candles and to drift down to the low of the day. At that low of the day, we've got about three hours of trading left. I'd like to see some red candles and I'd like to take that out with conviction. What I'm seeing right now is a series of lower highs. I'm seeing that the market can't get through VWAP. There's no reason for me to think there's going to be a late day bounce when the market hits resistance at VWAP. Sellers are aggressive at that point. So, I believe we're going to continue to drift lower. So, uh, I've got the trade on and if I start to get a 10point cushion in the trade, I'll put my stop at my break even. I don't want to lose money. I'd rather have a few more beers and relax today and enjoy the new year. So, uh, happy new year everyone. Happy new year here. Something's definitely happening, I think. And, uh, hope everyone has a safe evening and we will see you in 2026. trade well. Bye everyone.