All right. So so this morning 15 minutes the opening bell right now? uh, we, we don't have a lot moving. This has been the longest stretch for me of no trade days that I've ever had I have never had this many no trade days, all you know, this close together. Uh, but uh.

I Also, you know, maybe haven't had the level of discipline that I have right now right now. I'm I'm much more content to sit on the sidelines and wait for something that really looks good. Um, then just keep reducing my quality standard and take kind of like, you know, mediocre trades because I've I've at this point in my career and it's taken a long time to get here. But I'm sort of just like realizing that if I keep trading low quality setups I am just going to dig myself a hole and then look back and be like why was I trading those low quality setups in a market that didn't have a lot of momentum? You know, in a hot market I'll trade a low quality setup or you know, be your C quality setup and and it can work in a hot Market But if you do that in a cold Market that's when you start to dig yourself that hole and you're like wow, why was I trading so aggressively during a bad market and I've seen a number of Traders talk about trading really aggressively on Uh, First Republic taking big losses, you know? I'm not saying that this didn't present some opportunities, but you guys knew you know when I was talking about.

Silicon Valley Bank I said my bias on this. My gut tells me I should leave it alone and that was absolutely the right move. It halted not five minutes after I said that. I said the risk on Silicon Valley Bank is it gets halted and you know there's upside potential.

I'm not going to deny that, but there's also a lot of downside risk and I can't take the trade. It halts five minutes later and it's now at 40 cents a share. So I mean I I absolutely had the right Instinct there and and that's called Educated intuition. It's my gut and my gut knows on those types of stocks, the risk is way too high relative to the reward.

Now you know something like FRC Just you know. as a brief tangent, um, the longer it holds up here, you know, at 14 15. it's a Bear Flag right now. But the longer it holds up and doesn't fail, the more we might start to think about a possible curl.

Back to the upside. You know what? What if maybe some big investors come out I Don't know. Probably not a Warren Buffett But you know, maybe some big investors come out and they say, you know what? I'm I'm gonna put some money on FRC I think it's gonna go I You know these are inside. No they're not inside.

It's not insider trading, but these are institutional traders who. You know they they have the inside scoop. Let's let's be real. They're more connected than any of us could ever be.

So you know they they believe and you know maybe they've got a reason. Good reason to believe it that FRC is not going to go out of business and they say I'm gonna buy up you know, 50 million dollars someone else says I'm gonna buy 500 million and all of a sudden you see this wave of uh Traders investors come back in and then that's when you'll see those are the whales and then that's when you'll see the little fish like us. just kind of trade. you know, chasing uh in their wake to try to capture a little sliver of that opportunity back up.

That could happen, so there could be some potential there. But also what we've learned with FDIC and and the Federal government right now is that the depositors will get bailed out, but not the investors. What's the price of Silicon Valley Bank right now? 40 cents. So investors lost everything but the depositors were made whole.

Uh so well. I Guess it's a dollar, but in any case doesn't really matter. The fact is it's it's basically worthless. Um, it's on the OTC market right now and uh, investors lost pretty much everything so it would make it.

Should make an investor cautious to trade FRC or invest in it. But I've seen so many people trying to day trade it every single day because it goes from 14 to 15 or 13 to 14 because it does move. To me, it's playing with fire because you could have a repeat of what happened. uh on Silicon Valley Bank and I Certainly hope that doesn't happen, but it could happen.

So yeah, so the long and the short of it is that I do well when we have volatility. but when we have. So like let's say last year for instance, so last year we had um and I'll my camera a little bigger so you can see me better. So so last year we had um, we had oil right? So we had this huge surge in the price of oil and we saw incredible momentum.

We were in a bear Market But we saw momentum on all of these small energy stocks. small cap energy stocks that went up like crazy. So if we look at our chart, uh, what were some of them from last year you guys call them out and I'll I'll pull them up. We had um Indo Indo last year this one, uh, was crazy I mean this stock, You know last year this was in 2022.

it goes from four dollars a share to like a hundred bucks. Look at that. that's some momentum you had Impp, you had Husa. These were all energy stocks.

They all made huge moves. So what? We had Mxc Mexico So we had this sector that was really strong and that brought a lot of sympathy momentum on small cap stocks. and then during the summer last year still in a bear Market we had all these Chinese IPOs that were going crazy. We had Hudi I Think that this was one of them we had um, we had HKD I Mean it was like it was insane.

The average Chinese IPO was going up like 2500 percent. So that was even though we were in a bear. Market We had these little pockets of opportunity where we had sectors that were going like straight up. So what's different right now? Well right now we just had a sector that went like straight down Regional Banking and we had the um, the bailout or whatever you want to call it.

You know, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank We have um Western Alliance we have First Republic We have a number of other Banks um Pac W stock that are all down a lot. So what's the opportunity there? Well there, there clearly was some opportunity. The short side, although anecdotally I'd seen some short sellers who were shorting these who still managed to lose money. which is epically frustrating because we also saw on FRC and some of the others some kind of crazy pops.

you know, especially at the beginning Here this was a pop. You know in this day here there was a low and high like 45 and 95 dollars a share. So like you could lose money short on it as well. But but here's the thing.

Um, for me: I'm trading in a retirement account so that does leave me in a bear Market with a little bit um I I don't have as many tools as I maybe I'd like to have to work with I could trade to the short side in my traditional account, but naturally I would pay income tax on those gains and I'm a high income uh producer. So my income rate is is top bracket in both state and federal, so that means ultimately I'm going to pay like 40 over 40 percent of tax on any profit I make to the short side uh, which which creates an interesting risk to reward ratio when you're in the top income bracket. because if you lose money, you know you've obviously got these losses. Um, and if you make money, you only get to keep roughly half of what you make.

And that's not to mention the borrowing fees and everything else. And it's also not to mention the fact that to really be a probably professional short seller, you need to have Uh accounts with some of these Boutique Brokers that have higher minimums and in any case, it's a bit of a it's a more advanced Uh strategy I wouldn't say it's a beginner strategy and I think I've been proud of the fact that for a long time I focused on what I think is a fairly simple strategy that is a good strategy for beginners to learn and that's not short selling. I think Short Selling does carry more risk. it's it's quite risky for beginners.

not that it can't work, it can. But in any case, uh. so I didn't trade the bank stocks the short side. There was some opportunity there and I missed it.

It is what it is. But what the bank stocks created was some panic in the market and some fear. And trading in a market where there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of pan. It creates a lot of hesitation.

When there's a lot of hesitation, you end up having a lot of traders who are sitting on the sidelines. I'm included I'm sitting on the sidelines. What we're seeing are stocks that start to pop up. But you know big money is not moving into these stocks.

So we're almost seeing little fish biting on stocks that are starting to move. But the whales aren't coming in. So you know little fish like us. we feed off of what the whales are doing in a lot of ways.

but we're not seeing the whales so to speak. Uh, doing a whole lot. So the result is that we're seeing very small moves. You might see a stock that pops up on like 50 000 shares of volume and maybe it pops up, you know, 50 cents and then it kind of comes right back down.

and I have seen some of you guys who have been trading you know those pops shorting if something goes up and then covering as it comes back down. But I Also caution that strategy because shorting anything that pops um, you know, while it can work in a bear Market in a bullish Market that can be a very risky strategy is you have things like Indo which right now we can't we couldn't even possibly imagine. We have these stocks that you know they they pop and then they next thing you know they're up. Ten dollars a share, Twenty dollars a share and this is where you end up seeing the um, sort of typical P L of a lot of um short Sellers and you know it's just what I've seen.

which is these nice steady gain, steady gains, steady gains and then this one loss and that sucks. and listen, I have been there myself, uh, having steady gains, steady gain, study gains takes you know, weeks, months to get back and then it's like this and so that's one P L and and this is just sort of the risk of the averaging position when and you could have this if your strategy was long and you were buying dips because in this market dips don't seem uh to get bought up. And let's look at EBS from yesterday ABS was a stock yesterday that squeezed up and if you were a Trader who was buying dips, uh, well, it just K kept going lower. I mean it finally bounced a little bit, but you just would have to keep averaging, averaging, averaging and then if all of a sudden it just drops even lower.

you're blowing out with a huge loss. So My Equity curve right now looks a little different. you know it was kind of like this like this and now it's kind of softened and I've dropped down about maybe five or ten thousand dollars off the top and now I'm kind of going like this. all right.

So this isn't I mean I'm saying it's not I'm You know, being fully transparent, it's not a lot of fun to go sideways. Um, and this is really just over like the last three weeks isn't This isn't a big big period of time, but um, you know I've I've never had this many no trade days in a row. Uh, I've only taken one trade this whole week. that is unusual for me and last week I only took uh three trades I took three trades last week.

This is I mean you look at you go back a year to last March and I was taking 20. you know I mean look at the number of Trades I was taking. Not to say I wasn't having red days. Of course red days happen.

but the frequency of trading was so much. um, so much higher a year ago. But uh, yes, cash is a position. and right now I'm in the mindset of preserving Capital So one of the things that I have, um, sort of the benefit of right now and we've got about a minute to the Bell.

but I don't have anything I'm watching The Gap scanner right now. Nothing on the Gap scanner looks good. Scyx, it's up, um, 72 percent, but it's kind of just going sideways and now it's selling off. So this actually would have been an okay short on the break of V-wap right down there.

That's that's a setup I can get my head around a little bit better. but anyway, so that's that. VHC floats higher at 63 million. Sgbx is a dollar asset.

Shfs is also 58 cents too cheap, so leading gappers are I'm not interesting right now, so we'll see how what it looks like. Um, as we get closer as we get through the opening range, there have been more opportunities a little bit later in the day. That's when I got my Bmea trade. the other day.

S P is back above 400. And this is something that's also interesting is that the market is holding it together right now relatively well considering the banking crisis among Regional Banks. But we're also in a period in the market where you know more or less in the last two months, the price of the S P is unchanged. You know you go back to December.

Three months ago, Four months ago, we're kind of at the same spot. So we're We're definitely range bound. we're range bound, and it doesn't feel like the sentiment right now is particularly strong. There's a lot of traders who are just sitting on the sidelines.

They're like I don't know I'm not feeling it. um, you know, small Traders have probably gotten chopped up. Maybe some of them have even blown up accounts Big Money traders maybe I'm not even a big big money Trader but bigger Traders like myself, perhaps are just like. well, there's not a lot of opportunity.

So just sitting on the sidelines with our capital and all of that culminates um, with less volume, less liquidity, And in a way, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where it creates less volatility. So this is sort of an interesting thing when the market stalls out like this. uh, how does it? How does it kind of like reignite what what needs to happen for things to like, you know, Kind of get the win back at our sales a little bit here. So I would say that, um, what we really need, um, is we need a stock.

Ultimately, that does go really crazy and it catches people off guard and we might not know ever why that stock made that move. It could be that some big big investor out there decided they wanted to accumulate a big position. They just created a tremendous amount of buying um, strength and pressure and it overwhelmed. you know, short Sellers and they got squeezed out and then long start to come in a little bit so you know all of that could create a big move and then that would would kind of get some Traders Back off the sidelines, you know, seeing okay, we've got some action.

it's time to step up. Obviously, you know the Federal Reserve Pausing the increase in interest rates uh and eventually bringing the rates back down will have a big effect on the larger market, but to what extent you know high frequency trading algorithms and things like that have been tuned differently to a bear Market than they were in a bull market when we were seeing stocks going crazy like every day. So we may have some, uh, sort of institutionalized headwind that's holding things back a bit so you know all of that is to say that I think the best way to get through these periods is through discipline and patience I Have been through these Cycles before and that's what I look at them as as Cycles we have. The market is very cyclical.

We have hot cycles and we have cold cycles and we are on a cold cycle and this is one of the longest. Well, it's not the longest one, but it's one of the um, it's it's the coldest cycle in the sense that I've been willing to just sit on the sidelines and not trade. and I haven't had this many no trade days uh, probably ever. But that also is because uh, I'm more disciplined than I might have been.

you know, a couple years ago. So a couple years ago I would have kept trading, dug myself into the hole and gotten frustrated, and so right now I'm just kind of I'm on the sidelines and I'm not willing to participate and trade too much in a market that's not really. um, providing a lot of opportunity for the strategy that I trade and I've been trading for a long time, long enough to know that these Cycles come and go and that when it's hot, that's the time for me to push hard and to step up to the plate. and when it's cold.

I Really the best thing is for me to be patient. now. Obviously, the more strategies you have in your tool belt, the better equipped you are to sort of weather through the storm And there's nothing wrong with looking at trading to the short side or being willing to explore different strategies. but you want to be careful that you're doing it from a place of genuine curiosity and not desperation.

You know, when you start getting desperate, you're like I'm not making any money I need to be making money. Then you can start putting too much money on the line. In an unproven strategy, you find yourself with losses. You get even more frustrated and that, uh, really makes the situation worse.

So this could be an okay time to be practicing in a simulator and just you know, testing out, trading the short side or testing out mid Caps or large caps or whatever you want in a simulator in a safe environment. And for other Traders you know, like myself who have done quite well and have a real substantial track record, it's also okay to say you know what? this is a time where I'm gonna, you know, take a vacation, take a week off, and uh, you know, come back when things pick back up a little bit now. I'm not doing that exactly I mean I am still here I've logged in every day even though I've been I was traveling last week, but you know I'm not I'm really not willing and interested in, um, putting myself in a position of taking unnecessary losses. So right now, so far, it's a no trade day, you know I'm I'm totally okay with that and that for me is a is sort of a big development.

but I think it's important that you know I'm not I'm not a gambler I'm not here just to like, you know, press the buttons and get the thrill of either having a big win or a big loss. I am trading a strategy. It's a proven strategy. I've traded for a really long time I've traded it through ups and downs in the market through hot and cold.

Cycles We've had periods that have been extended periods of very slow trading and I've gotten through it in different ways. Sometimes just by trading, you know one or two trades a day for, you know, a few weeks, a few months, whatever it is, and then on the other side of it in the next hot cycle. It's like wow. night and day.

Crazy how much different the market feels. Uh, you know between these hot and cold cycles and when it's cold, it sometimes feels like it's never going to get hot again. And when it's hot, you think it's never going to get cold. You know it's just a it's a mental trap in in the way many of us think about trading.

so my opinion right now is just to you know, put in the time, sit in the chair, look at the market watch, see what we get for opportunities If we, um, we, you know I mean I'm happy to sit down, you know, my regular time and I'm happy to sit here a little bit later in the morning and see if we do get some. you know, 9, 30 to 10, 30 Momentum. But you know if if we don't I'm not going to sit here until four o'clock Some people will, and you may find some, you know, sporadic opportunities at different times of the day, but doesn't it seem To make more sense to put in the extra time when the Market's High Isn't that when you're going to get the most return for your money and when it's cold, wouldn't it make sense that this would be the time that you focus on some other endeavors that you have, whether it's other strategies in trading or it's a side hustles that you have that could be income producing. Because one of the things that we know is that the traders who tend to make the most are the ones who need it the least from trading.

In other words, they have several sources of income. They're very financially comfortable, and they don't feel the insecurity, the desperation, or the pressure that can lead a lot of beginner traders to become impulsive and and irrational in the way they trade. So I'm grateful to be Green on the year. Uh, you know I'm I'm I'm very happy for that.

Us you know stock like FRC or Silicon Valley Bank if I trade it the wrong way and had forbid was in the halt. Uh, you know that could change the way my year looks substantially. you know, 5 000 shares at forty dollars a share, you know it's that's that could be a six-figure loss I certainly could do without that. So um, so you know I'm I'm being a bit more cautious I'm exercising some restraint and I think that that is the right move for right now I am being a little bit um, stubborn by not trading much of anything to the short side.

but you know, like I said with taxes um and sort of the risk reward ratio on it and the fact that I don't really think it's a suitable beginner strategy I'm I'm comfortable with uh, my position on that for right now. So you know, always subject to change. but um, you know for what it's worth I mean you know a few years ago when everyone's talking about crypto, well the Market's slow, you know, why don't you trade crypto? Why don't you trade crypto? You know people tend to flock to different things uh, that that are of interest and I you know I I never got into that and well maybe I left some money on the table. There was some opportunity there, you know at the end of the day.

um I think my my gut feeling on crypto was that I didn't really trust it and I didn't feel comfortable with it and you know with what everything we saw with FTX um you know some of these other exchanges that was the that was the I think that was the ultimately as it turned out, the right move long term. but you know. So anyways, um right now I'm just sitting tight and we'll see whether or not anything does. um show up today that looks good.

but like I said, I'm perfectly content to be patient. This is a great time to be studying If you can make it in this kind of environment and make it generally speaking like keep your head above water. That is going to be a really good indicator for you know your future ahead for sure. I Mean you know I guess unless your strategy.

So if you trade a very similar strategy to me and you're able to keep your head above water, that's really good. If you're trading the short side, then that's different because that when we go back into a bull market. um, you may find these stocks are just irrationally strong and that will be a more difficult strategy during that period of time. But it it really, it does depend.

so it's a good time to be gaining experience learning more about Marcus sentiment. Uh, being patient and keeping your head above water. One of the things that's true is that a lot of Traders will stay out of the market completely. Um, during these times and they're missing the opportunity to gain experience.

So try to try to at least make the best of this uh, opportunity and gain some experience. And um I think you'll be. You'll be happy as a result of that. Yeah, so I See, Um, Aplm.

Let's see. Um, yeah, so Aplm. Um, you know the problem is. you've got a hundred thousand shares of volume.

This is the challenge with these. It's just not. It's not. a lot of liquidity, you know.

I I wouldn't be able to get in and out with any reasonable position. so I'm just not really wanting to scrape the bottom of the barrel on that I want to be trading things that I think big Traders are going to be moving in and out of where we'll have liquidity where I can size up and you know if I can be a sniper with a few of those trades each each month. those are going to pay really well, you know and for what it's worth. I had a great day when what day was it? um when we had Ocea I think it was um I had an eleven thousand dollar a day on Ocea had a see there's another good day in there.

Was it? eighteen thousand dollar a day on Baer So you know I've had a couple of good days recently and that's maybe an interesting, um, you know, an interesting sort of attempt right now or a thought of you know what if I had uh, you know, just you know, 20 days like that this year you know 20, 15, 20, 000 days. that could mean I have a lot of days of sitting and being patient and then I have some days where I'm stepping up and hitting hard and on the days where I step up and hit hard, it more than makes up for the days of you know, going sideways, being patient, staying at it right? So you know you've got 250 trading days in the year and my good days are ten thousand dollars and higher. You know 15 to 20 is a great day for me right now. So if I had you know 10 10 000 days this year it's 100 Grand.

if I have 20 of them, that's 200 Grand 30 of them 300 Grand and if I have a couple days in there they're 15 or 20. you know that's going to be even more so. that comes back to asking the question of is this the market right now where I'm gonna see that kind of profit and although you know, maybe catching you know one of these really light volume stocks with 2 000 shares for 10 points to do it. Uh, the days where I really do the best uh is when we have a stock that's very liquid and I can move in and out with fifteen twenty thousand shares and capture.

you know 30 Cent moves like five, six grand and do that four or five times in one day. That's those are the days. I do the best. Yeah you know it's every now and then.

I'll you know I'll buy a stock, it'll halt up, it'll open Five Points higher and I'm up ten Grand I'm like whoa but for me that's that's always just been so like hit or miss and it happens. You know it does happen sometimes but um I it's just I don't feel like I can count on that I need the liquidity I need the volume. So anyways, uh you know that's kind of. That's my two cents on current market state of the market and I'm being patient right now.

it's about quarter of ten so we'll see if anything else. um starts still at good between now and maybe 10 30. all right. So uh, you know, just sharing that with you and I'm gonna sit here and and be patient.

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