Hey everyone! Alright, so today day before Christmas it's a half day in the market. Market closes at 1:00 p.m. and it really wasn't planning on being too aggressive today. I Just figured I'd you know, open up my laptop, see if there was anything moving and you know what ended up making almost $5,000 So that's why I Love to you know, open up the computer I can do it from anywhere in the world, even from an airport lounge and just see is anything moving.

is there anything interesting? Then we had two great stocks right off the watchlist. So while the overall market is red, day traders are green and we are happy about that. So I'm going to break down all the trades in today's midday market recap. and as usual, any questions, any comments, leave them below, subscribe to the channel if you like the videos and I'll see you first thing on Wednesday morning.

All right, Merry Christmas Everyone Alright everyone. So and we're gonna go over the trades from today in our midday market recap. Finishing well: I think I left my calendar back at the office but I believe this is the 234 day of the year or something like that and I'm finishing up four thousand, seven hundred eighty dollars and 93 cents which is awesome. That is a really solid green day.

A much bigger Green Day than I was expecting here on. Christmas Eve The market is closed tomorrow. it closes at 1:00 p.m. Eastern today.

So today's a half-day in the market and I really just kind of thought. you know I pop open my laptop's you know here at the house and it's a little bit of a snow day, but you know, see if I could make you know a little bit of money or at least you know, point you guys in the right direction of what's moving today and what to be careful of. But we ended up having two decent looking setups right off the watch list CEI and A-t-il and you know I'm green on both of those trades. So total today I took let's see one, two, three, four, five different entry points and was Green on all five of them.

so that really nice helping boost up the accuracy a little bit. You know it's been a little bit of a slower month, but you know what? the good news is I'm green this month. the overall market is red, but I'm up, you know, And that's been true every single month this year except for February. So Green right now 11 out of 12 months and that's kind of a reality of most traders.

We set different goals, we manage our risk differently, and so we're able to really kind of navigate red markets and stay green because we focus on the opportunity that's right in front of us. Overall market has been red for the last nine days and I've been green You know I mean it's disappointing to see the overall market down because we you know a lot of us have retirement account and You know 401ks or whatever else that is invested in the overall market. Which is the right thing to do historically because the market returns certainly better than sitting in a cash account at your you know your savings and loan earning zero percent interest and losing due to inflation. So you know if you put a hundred dollars in a savings account in 1900 and took it out today, it's still a hundred bucks.

whereas if you put a hundred dollars into the market and took it out today, you know I don't even know what it would be. but you know it's the difficult thing of course, would being an active trader while at the same time a passive long-term investor is that it can feel days or weeks or months where the overall markets down. It can certainly feel a little discouraging because you're watching the market every single day. Yeah, so when I see the markets down 600 points I'm like doing the math.

I'm like oh man, it means my longtime long-term 401k is gonna be down. You know, if the markets down 10 percent, my 401k is probably down six percent. You know, cuz 660 percent of its in equities. So I'm you know, doing the math there.

and obviously that's not fun, but you know, on the other hand, this is the reality of putting money in your 401k. You really shouldn't be checking it every single day because it's gonna go up and it's gonna go down. It's gonna fluctuate I Mean that's just the reality of what the markets do. So if you pan when it dips and you sell out, you know that's that's not a good idea.

And you look at the Sp500 over the last, you know, 10 15 years, you know we pull this way back on the daily chart and and you can see obviously there's been some periods of real indecision. This isn't the first time we've seen indecision in the market. I Mean you know, yes, this is more sustained than the last couple of pull backs, but you know it's not. It's not necessarily.

you know, uncommon to see volatility in the market. So you know, every few years. So we've had this pullback and start in January Kind of got back up and then you know, rolling over here, we had this back in 2015. we dropped down, we came back up, then we came all the way back down.

Now at least then we were sort of basing out here. we broke our base which is a little disappointing. You know you go further back. and for the people in 2008 that panicked and took their money out of the market, you know because obviously when you were looking at the market and you saw this kind of move that was disappointing, you know this drop here in 2002 and then regained back to 2008 and then pulled back again even more.

You know that wasn't a nice thing to see if you were especially, you know, within two years of retiring. but you know, if you were at that time in your you know late twenties, early thirties doesn't really make a difference. You leave your money, you let it work and look at it now you know you're still well. Green over that period of time.

not to mention the return you might have gotten from dividends and things like that. I I'm a you know, fan of dividend stocks and dividend ETFs when possible, just because you know worse comes to worse if you hold, If you're holding a million shares, you're at least gonna collect the dividend on those. and during the Great Depression people were living off their dividends. Rather than sell the stocks which were worth very little, they would just cash the dividend checks and that was enough for them to you know, get through.

you know, living you know, certainly more frugally than during a stronger time, but you know that's that anyway. So that's a little bit of a side note. but for us that are active traders, you know we certainly are able to navigate these waters and stay trained. And if they're the problem for me, of course, is that you know, with half a million dollars of profit this year, it doesn't really make sense for me to keep all of that in my day trading account because generally the biggest positions that I take are only you know, forty to fifty thousand dollars worth.

So this year, the half million dollars of profit that I made I would have made that whether my account had 80 thousand dollars in it or eight hundred thousand dollars in it. So it doesn't really make sense to put the extra seven hundred fifty thousand dollars in this account because that's an opportunity cost. If I put that seven hundred fifty thousand dollars into you know, a long term, you know, retirement account. you know, just say I'm putting it away.

Aggressive growth is the target I'm not gonna look at it when I do come back in 20 years, it'll be much better off because I did that Then if I kept all of that money in my day trading account to the point where you know three years from now I have two million or three million dollars in the day trading account. and yes, obviously making you know five hundred thousand on two million dollars is a good return. But when you could have made that same exact amount with you know, the only 80 thousand, then all that extra money is basically just sitting there idle. It's basically the equivalent of it sitting in a in a checking account.

So all of us are gonna face that point if you're a successful trader that you're making more money then you can really actively trade with and that's a good problem to have. And so you know whether you want to invest in real estate or you want to buy a small business, or you know you just kind of want to go passive and put it in the market and let it work. Any single one of those, you're gonna have headaches. now.

right now, people that are putting their money in the market are having headaches. but during the realistic you know crisis, those people were having headaches. When you have you know concerns about you know you have a flooding, a flood in town, or you have you know, wildfires, or you have a hailstorm. All of those create headaches for property owners.

and then you know with a small business, the ebbs and flows of small businesses can create headaches. so you know there's even the most passive income is still gonna give you some headaches from time to time. But for me I Really focus on, you know, being an active trader with my relatively small account, taking out the profits, putting some away for tax, putting the rest away for long term stuff, you know, spend some whatever, save some, try to be smart about it, and and just not panic when the market drops. You know people like Warren Buffett They get excited when they see these types of drops because these are opportunities you know for them to buy really strong companies at the discounted price.

So anyways, this morning, the watchlist pretty pretty straightforward. We had a Gap scanner here. Historical date and time will run this at 9:25 a.m. So the two stuff the one stock that was at the top of the scan this morning and I see that it looks like my YouTube is her.

My Facebook is glitching out just a smidge. I'm gonna turn off my video and see if that helps it. Where's my mouse over there? No video. So let me just check one thing.

and actually that's not okay. So CEI was our leading gapper. As you can see, it was gapping up a lot. and that's because it was a reverse split.

So it was actually in total gapping down. It wasn't actually gapping up, but because the reverse split it appeared that it that it was gapping up. So on this one we had the pre market high or the after-hours high of $2.50 We had this pullback and I was just kind of watching it out of the gates for a little scalp. over a dollar 90 / $2.00 I wasn't really thinking about anything that exciting.

It goes red right out of the gates. it then curls back up and I jump in a dollar 98 and $2.00 for a red to green move the first candle to go Green after this little bit of pullback. So you'll see that order here. A buy order in the buy over to 6000 shares and a sell order.

a sell order and a sell order. Canceled orders didn't fill and selling the rest coming back down just a little small scalp. I Wasn't sure if it was gonna really hold up and make a big move, but it was definitely worth a try so did okay on that one which is good and then the next one was ad IL this actually wasn't on the Gap scanner, however someone had posted in the chat room that there was news on this morning. The headline was they retire all outstanding debt which is a really terrific catalyst I mean this is a great catalyst so you know we really like to see that with companies and the pre market high on this was just about four dollars.

But here's what I was looking at I was looking at the daily level four dollars and 33 cents that that was a really big breakout. Okay so for 33 and then the squeeze here up to $5 I knew we had no resistance until five and so on this one I had it on watch I had the level two window up so I had it open just like this ad IL and I was looking at some other stocks and then I look over and I saw squeezing up right around five right around four dollars. it was about 380 at the time 390 and it breaks through and as soon as I saw that I was quick to jump in. So I jumped in this at 399 for of to 405, adding at 410 and 417 and then putting out in order to add on the other side of the halt at 429.

So this timestamp is when I press the Buy button during the hall I press the Buy button at 4:29 because I knew that I wanted to add coming out of the hall for the break over four dollars and 33 cents which was our daily trigger. From there, my target was the half dollar and then certainly $5 but I didn't know if it would make that move all at once for a couple reasons. You know. number one: C I which I had just traded popped up and ended up fading.

The market has been strong for small caps, but you know on a daily today we're closes at 1:00 p.m. and where there's just less traders in the market. I Wasn't certain that there would be really enough people watching the stock to create that resolution, so it ends up coming out of the hall and squeezing up to a high of 455 and then fading back down to 420. I did what I think was the right move which was selling through that move through that move right there and then I added back at 4:38 as it squeezed back up and I doubled at four.

Let's see where was it 446 right here so added it 438 is to scallop this move at it again at 446 and we ended up getting a squeeze I guess we got. we got up to 52 and then we pulled back and then where did I get back in? I got back in right on the first one minute micro pullback right here after this fresh breakout. so adding back at 84 which was right here 79 80 going with smaller size on this of 1,500 shares and then pressing the shift one hot key at 84 when I was starting to feel confident and selling at 88, 96, 96, 99 and then the rest is 79. In hindsight, it would have been really nice to just hold that whole position all the way up to 5 dollars and 75 cents.

I was right, I had absolutely the right idea, but I could have just as easily seen this stock from this point here, consolidating sideways and just sort of fading. Given that we're on a sort of day before a holiday and everything else now, the catalyst certainly helped I think a lot of traders were probably watching this is it was hitting the scanners and everything else. but you know? and yeah, I don't know what is going on my Facebook feed. sorry about that guys and it's probably gonna be the same way on YouTube it's just it's a conflict on my computer I think running the chat room and Facebook But anyways, yeah so we got that move here up to 492 pull back up to 5, pull back two, five, ten pullback, and then up to 575 which is now the high a 575.

So we're right around there. 574 Yeah, 575 so you know I I'm green on it and I'm gonna be happy with that I really wasn't expecting this to be a big green day and I'm up almost $5,000 the day before Christmas So I'll be happy with that. Another solid Green Day and we'll look to do it again on Wednesday Thursday and Friday and try to finish up this year. Really strong all right you guys! So I hope everyone has a great day off tomorrow.

We'll be back at it first thing Wednesday morning and I'm really hoping that we see some some continued momentum. All right, I'll see you guys first thing on Wednesday Morning bye everyone! If you're still watching, you must have really enjoyed that video. So why not subscribe and get email alerts any time? I upload new content. Remember when you subscribe, you become a member of the Warrior Trading family.