Webinar

I have been offering calendar spreads as a relatively riskless way to play the bull market in T-Bonds. If you’re interested in initiating the spread but are unsure about how to do it, this recording provides explicitly detailed instructions for buying the Oct 18/Sep 12 calendar spread at the 120 strike that anyone can follow. It also explains how to roll the spread forward each week so that we wind up owning the October 18 calls for nearly nothing or perhaps even a small credit. There is other material as well, including an analysis of the Jackpot Bet I’d proffered for Priceline this morning. But if you’re interested only in the material concerning the TLT strategy, it begins 11 minutes and 26 seconds into the session. The entire recording, which also includes Hidden Pivot analysis for Gold, E-Mini &S&P and EUR/USD, runs a little more than an hour.

We spent the entire hour chasing Netflix lower, zooming our way down to the 15-second bar chart in the process. The niggling details of finding tradable patterns at that level are surely worth pondering, but the more valuable insights came from psychologizing the dips, twists and turns. The ending is the punchline to a joke that all traders have been the butt of at one time or another, but I won't spoil it for you. Suffice it to say, NFLX bounced from a low that was almost, but not quite, perfect.

In this lesson, I reviewed some basic Hidden Pivot concepts, since there were a number of traders in the room who have registered for the upcoming webinar on August 27. We dwelled mainly on the E-Mini S&Ps in real time, since an early-morning rally offered the possibility of tradable follow-through. Alas, stocks merely marked time for the remainder of the day. But novices and experienced traders alike will find value in this recording, since it examines the psychology of a bull trade as it played out on the lesser charts.

We got into the heads of other traders during this session, helping us initiate profitable trades in the E-Mini S&Ps and December Gold futures in real time and with relatively little risk. These were small trades in not-very-promising circumstances, to be sure. But that was a purpose of the exercise – i.e., to force trades that looked even the least bit appealing, and to analyze the ‘psychology’ of the trades in minute-by-minute detail. Both set-ups required using the ‘camouflage’ entry technique, and although this required some work, it reduced our entry risk down to nearly nothing.

Bond prices were diving when the  tutorial session began, ostensibly because of a fraudulent report that GDP had grown by 4% in the last quarter.  The market’s unwarranted reaction to this disinformation afforded us an unusual opportunity to buy call spreads in TLT at fire sale prices.  This lesson contains some of the most detailed instructions I’ve ever presented for “working” an options order.  As you will discover, the task does NOT require a sophisticated understanding of puts and calls -- only a focus on bids and offers for a couple of TLT calls tied to a calendar spread that deserved to be bought extremely aggressively.

Are the broad averages setting up for one last hurrah? Skip to the second half of this recording for a technical assessment, since that’s where the lesson turned interesting. The material includes not only rally projections for several popular trading vehicles, but detailed instructions on how to use put spreads to make low-cost, bearish bets if and when the upside targets are achieved.

Sometimes we forget how very easy it can be to make the $400 a day needed to earn $100,000 a year trading in our spare time. What does it take? Not much for those who are willing to focus diligently on opportunities that typically occur in the first hour of the day. Skip to the end of this recording to see what I’m talking about. The short in TSLA was based on a set-up so perfect that it would have been unavoidable for any Hidden Pivot trader who was prepared to act. The trade would have produced a profit of between $2000-$4000 in a few hours with little or no stress. Check it out if you need to be reminded of what a great camouflage trade looks like.

Although I typically warn against “trying this yourself” when I put out option trades, there are some simple tricks that anyone can learn that can mitigate or prevent costly errors. In this lesson, we paused to look at the put-and-call grid in conjunction with a stock trade under consideration. How much should one pay for a certain option with the underlying stock at a given price? There are easier ways to answer this question than you might have imagined.

Many subtle things to appreciate in this week’s lesson, including a perfect, tradable low at 1940.00 in the E-Mini S&Ps and a very juicy shorting target we may get to use in in NFLX. I continue to pay particular attention to ‘contrary’ opportunities that go against the conventional rules of ABC trading: entry points that follow ‘sausage B’ highs or lows, and the most contrarian play of all: shorting at the long-entry signals of ABC patterns that are all too obvious. We also spent a little time on the 15-second bar chart in the E-Mini, discovering in the process that although this algo-driven vehicle has grown increasingly difficult to trade, it can still be beaten. A case in point is the 1940.00 target noted above. In this lesson, I elucidate a half-dozen reasons why we should have been willing to bet the farm on the target, albeit with a stop-loss as tight as three ticks.