Dan Passarelli, CEO - Market Taker Mentoring

⇐click the image to view the video 

Is this the most boring thing ever? No, we're not talking about the new show on hulu. We're not talking about your Aunt Sally. She might be a close second. We're talking about trading.

And yeah, it kind of seems out of place to say that, but a lot of people say trading should be boring and there's a couple of reasons for that. First of all, the big enemies of trading are emotions, especially fear and greed, right? They make us make bad decisions. Fear is supposed to be a helpful emotion and out in the wild in a lot of cases I guess it is. But in trading it's not trading.

It's much better to have a plan and to have a predetermined what you're going to do to have your methodology set up. And speaking of methodology, that's the other thing, the other reason why maybe trading should be boring. Because you know why? Because to be consistent in your trading requires a methodology. Just a step by step approach.

No room for creativity, no room for trying something new this time. No room for mixing it up and having little excitement. It's all about consistency, having that simple step by step plan that we follow. To be consistent, to remove emotion and to hopefully be boring. Well, I hope that helps.

Dan Passarelli, CEO - Market Taker Mentoring

⇐click the image to view the video 

A lot of traders, as soon as the bell rings and the markets open, they start trading. And for some people that can be a great idea, but for others, it might not.

Let's talk about when is a good time to trade certain things and when is not, especially based on your level of experience.

During the open and the close, a lot of weird things can happen. You just kind of see some prices that maybe you don't expect something to trade at. You could get a sort of a random fill at a higher price or a lower price than you expect, and there's a lot more seemingly randomness to it. Sometimes a more experienced person can kind of figure that out and use some of that to their advantage. But I think newer folks are better served to just sort of wait until the market quiets down, wait about 15 to 30 minutes until after the market opens, and then place it in the typically less volatile time of the day.

Now, the same goes for the close. This is typically the last ten minutes of the day. And one of the special things about the close is that the bid ask spreads; here, if you look at Johnson and Johnson (I'm shooting this one evening after the markets closed) you see that the market is really kind of widened out a fair amount. If we were looking at Johnson and Johnson during the day, we would see some tighter markets than this. It just makes it harder to trade and harder to get filled.

You could leave a resting order in the middle of the market, and if you just leave it into the close, you might get filled and you might not. And one thing traders don't like is randomness. Even though that's the thing we deal with every single day, we like to be able to control the things we can control and try and profit from the sea of randomness that is the market. So experienced folks go for it all day. Opens and closes are great. Beginner traders: Definitely better to stick towards the middle of the day, wait 15 to 30 minutes, and skip the last ten minutes, and I hope that helps. 

Dan Passarelli, CEO - Market Taker Mentoring

⇐click the image to view the video 

The markets continue to climb. Something that we talked about in these videos for a while, expected that there could be a little bit more followthrough, but doesn't it seem like we might be getting close? I mean, what will it take in order to signal that the short term top of the market is in? Well, it doesn't just happen.

There's always catalysts, both fundamental and also technical. Now fundamentally, I said that I expected this week to be a little bit slow, a little bit more quiet and say it was really a pretty aggressive upday. Frankly, a little bit of a surprise to me. It's only 1.5% or so. It was a little bit higher than that at one point. So not a huge up surprise or anything, but it did move a little bit more than I thought it was. I figured that the market would sit pretty tight until Friday when the unemployment situation comes out. Now that said, here's a pattern that I've seen hundreds of times throughout my career, is when the market is waiting for news and it rises. Today it rose largely because of good earnings reports and good economic news. But what has often ended up happening once the news comes out on Friday is that some overzealous news ends up priced in and that's where we can get that pullback.

Now I'm not necessarily predicting it or calling that there will be a pullback on Friday, but I'm just saying that I wouldn't be surprised and it's something I want to watch. We often see this over selling this. Now another thing that we can watch here is down here, the RSI, which I've been mentioning, it's approaching one of its higher levels than we've seen. This is actually a one year charge that I'm looking at. Now back here in late November we had overbought and it was really just a small pullback until we got just a little bit past that still kind of kissing the 70 area and then we got a minor pullback.

So don't get me wrong, if we do get a pullback on Friday, that's just basically some profit taking from all the good news being priced in. I'm not necessarily looking at a crash or anything like that, looking for a little bit of a pullback. But hey, in markets like these where we get some oscillations, we get some volatility, these can be some of the best option trader markets there are. I hope that helps. 

Dan Passarelli, CEO - Market Taker Mentoring

⇐click the image to view the video 

Here's one of the biggest moves that we've come across over the last couple of days. It was in Revlon, symbol: REV.

Take a look at a chart of Revlon. And as you can see, yesterday: holy cow. We had a huge move from down in the low four dollar handle all the way up, almost kissing $10. And we crossed that area today. So what exactly happened here?

Well, this is a short squeeze, but it was a short squeeze that had a little bit of a catalyst. The catalyst here is that a bankruptcy judge is allowing Revlon to proceed with a $1.4 billion loan. The stock, of course, is heavily shorted out of thinking that the stock is going into bankruptcy. And I guess a lot of the thought there is that maybe this $1.4 billion can help them avoid such a fate. There's a lot of back and forth and details involved in this.

I highly encourage you to look it up. And, of course, if you're an Option Raider user, you would have seen this today or yesterday. And I want to keep an eye on it. Folks who bought calls could have got an extremely leveraged profit on the move over the last couple of days, so keep an eye on it. Really hope that helps. 

Dan Passarelli, CEO - Market Taker Mentoring

⇐click the image to view the video 

The market was pretty calm today. Really not very much movement. It made a little bit of a run to the upside. Pulled back, still up on the day, no big shakes, nothing exciting going on.

And why is that? That has a lot to do with the Fed meeting last week and everything that needed to get kind of shaken out of the system did. But unemployment figures come out this Friday and there's not really too big of a point in making a big bet on the market until investors get a chance to see what the unemployment rate has been for the past month. So when we get the big report on Friday, we'll be able to see a little bit more movement in the broad market. Now that said, we are still in the heart of earnings season.

We're seeing some stocks that are excellent individual opportunities to play, especially from an earnings trading basis. But as far as market as a whole, it's likely to remain fairly quiet it until Friday morning and then we'll see where we go from there. 

Dan Passarelli, CEO - Market Taker Mentoring

⇐click the image to view the video 

Happy Friday. Coming into the weekend, and man, none too soon. It's been a crazy week. We had the Fed raising interest rates, 75 basis points. We had a big move to the upside after that. We had lots of of crazy earnings, lots of earnings trading. Now we're looking forward to settling into the weekend. Let's talk big picture here for a second: weekends, I believe, are actually a very important part of your trading career.

You don't trade on the weekends, right, because the market's closed. Unless you're trading currency or crypto or something like that, the market's closed. It's nice to kind of relax and clear your head a little bit. But you know what it's also nice for? It's also nice for moving forward in your trading, right? Sometimes it's hard to fit in all the training we need during the week, especially if we have one of those full time J-O-B's. But even if we're a very active trader and if we're in front of our screen every day, sometimes we're not able to read and to watch all the trainings that we want to. So guess what?

Take a look at Dan's calendar here for tomorrow, which is July 30th. Guess what? We are going to have a special trader training, and we're going to be talking about trades that are working in this current market.

This is a really important training because when the market is uncertain like it has been, and we get some of these crazy moves and just a lot of unexpected things happening: interest rates, inflation and recession, Ukraine thing still going on, right? With all these things, it's really important to be able to navigate the market when the market is this uncertain. But there are some trades that are working, and that's what I'm going to be sharing tomorrow. Click here to register and save your place. 

Sign up for our webinar for tomorrow morning. It is at 11am Eastern time, and it's going to be a great training. You're going to be totally prepared to go into the dog days of summer here in August and ready to kick some butt next week. Trade smart and have a great weekend.