All right. Well, I'm going to give you my uh recap here for today: Traded three stocks, green, three out of three names and I'm gonna shut it down here at 10 A.M I Don't really see a lot happening today. We continue to have this, um, larger event going on in the banking sector which is sort of creating both a distraction because some Traders are actively trading those stocks. uh, but also just in general it's like creating uh, some volatility in the market that I think is making Traders a bit more cautious right now and it's making a little bit harder to focus.

So that all began last week with a Silicon Valley Bank Sivb uh selling off hard for uh well really it was. It was one day of selling off and then the next day as they were selling uh positions and trying to do a um I don't know it was like a two billion dollar offering. My understanding is they had uh, invested clients money and bonds and then when the interest rates went up the the face value of the bonds went down even though at the end of their maturity they would still get back the actual amount. If you have to sell them sooner, you're selling them at a loss So it creates kind of a you know, like for us or for you know, maybe a Trader like myself.

if I have a bond in my long-term uh IRA account, maybe I bought it. Let's say at a thousand dollars and right now it's worth I don't know. Nine hundred dollars. that's face value is 900 and it makes it look like I'm at a loss.

but uh I don't plan to sell it I don't need to sell it. it's in my retirement account and when it matures I will get back the thousand dollars because that's the way the bond works when it matures and I get paid the interest rate at the time. The problem is, people don't want to buy my bond right now because I bought it at a time when interest rates were lower and so its face value has decline. Now some banks, um, quote their portfolio holding based on, uh, the actual face value.

Well, perhaps others are showing based on the value at maturity. Uh, which doesn't reflect what happens if they need to sell it sooner. So my understanding is they needed to sell bonds sooner because people started. well.

they're in the Venture Capital startup sector. that's their Niche those are obviously we haven't seen the last small cap. IPOs That sector has not done well in the last year of being in a bear market. So I guess you had clients that were drawing and tapping on their funds which then created the need to actually sell some of these bonds that they had invested in.

This is the thing with a bank is that you know you put a million dollars into the bank. It doesn't just sit there in cash, The bank then turns around and does stuff with that money. Maybe It issues mortgages, it's a saving and Loan issues mortgages in the local community and that's good. The bank makes you know four percent on the mortgage and then pays you, uh, tenth of one percent interest on your balance.

They make money on that, right? But then, of course, what happened in 2008 highlighted how uh Banks do need to be regulated in terms of their lending practices to make sure they're maintaining a good financial position. So investing in bonds has consistently been. uh, you know, another thing that banks will do and it's pretty. You know, treasuries are pretty low risk except for uh, the fact I mean you're definitely getting your money back.

but if you need your money in the interim, it can be you have to sell for a little less than face value. So uh, what happened with uh Silicon Valley Bank is they sold for less than face value? but they had to make up the difference. which they I guess tried to do by doing an offering and you know again, like I I only sort of follow it because it's not. It's somewhat interesting, but it's really not in my wheelhouse of what I trade.

So anyways, I don't spend that much time uh, thinking about it. But anyways, so I guess the offering uh, really shook investors uh made people start to pull more and more withdrawals out of the bank. and I actually got emails um from one of our um software as service vendors that hey, don't send any money to our Silicon Valley bank account. Uh, because our bank? uh well, we don't even know if we're gonna get any of that money back.

That was our primary bank account I Saw an email from a toy store that said uh, their Bank just went out of business and they don't know if they're going to get any of their money back. So they're doing a 40 off sale over the weekend and all the money is going to go into their new Chase bank account. So you know I mean this is scary stuff when that happens. Uh, so anyways, uh Silicon Valley Bank goes down quite a bit more on Friday and then it ends up halting.

So then you had other Banks um that are smaller Banks more Regional Banks like FRC that dropped from 125 dollars all the way down to a low today of twenty dollars a share. So now there's fear in the market. We saw the same thing on pack W which is another small Bank Pac West Bank Corp Uh, we even are seeing it on Charles Schwab which is down almost 50 percent in the last week now I Feel like Charles Schwab is suffering from sympathy weakness because the banking sector is weak and I feel like it's I but again, this is hard for me to know without having looked at the filings and this and that. Um, and even if I did look at the filings, there's no guarantee I would really and be able to know behind the scenes what's actually happening.

But it seems to me like Charles Schwab being a a huge huge organization is most certainly going to weather this, uh, this storm and that this might actually be a buying opportunity maybe somewhere in this area right now. It depends on how the daily candles close, but it doesn't seem to me like the business has actually is actually worth fifty percent less than it was two weeks ago. Based on what what has changed in their business model, it's fear. What's what's come in is a tremendous amount of fear.

So in any case, all of this has created a bit of a distraction. I think uh, you know, Well it's a distraction to me because I usually am trading small cap stocks price between 2 and 20. we are seeing some stocks that have been Bank stocks coming into that price range but they're so volatile and what I said on Friday I was like I'm not going to trade uh Silicon Valley Bank This thing could get halted at any moment. And it did.

It got halted and the stock price is probably going to resume at zero. It's gone, the company, the bank got taken over by regulators I Don't know if that's going to happen with any other. Banks I Don't think it's going to happen with Charles Schwab or Bank of America but you know some of the smaller Banks You don't know. So then the question in some ways is, how exactly does stock price? um connect back to the company's ability to do their day-to-day operations and you know this bank has declined 75 80 in price over the last.

You know week. Does it actually change their ability to do business? Well, you know, as long as they're still um, they're still liquid and they have the ability to meet the deposits that customers are potentially asking for, then they should be able to continue to run the business. You know, they're certainly times where insiders, uh, borrow money against the value of their stock and where companies can do that as well. and then they can get you know collateral requirements.

So there are some complex things there that can happen, but um, you know it so and you don't really know the answer in any individual case without really digging deep. And even if you dig deep as a retail Trader we may not know the whole story versus what a institutional Trader might have you know knowledge of or more access to the information. So anyways, I I just am saying steer clear I Don't want to get um I don't want to get uh, caught in a halt like what could have happened on Sivb on Friday So the result was that this morning I took a trade on Cmnd this stock popped up pre-market uh took two trades on it, made 346 dollars, got in at 465, went back up to five dollars, hit a high of 5 10. so that was one trade.

kind of boring. trade was small size, but that was it. Uh, took a trade on Lunar at the open. it was squeezing up and I thought all right, if it wants to go, I'll give it a try.

Got in at 16.50 added at 1670, it flushed down to 1612 added at 1628. Was starting to worry that maybe I was adding too much into weakness, but it did hold that flat bottom at 1610. bounced back up to 17 18. I got out of it as it broke over 17.

it pulled back, came back up again I didn't get back in after that false breakout candle I thought nah I think I'm I think I'm good today and then try to take one trade on Euda on a halt resumption. but I got only a partial fill. sort of choppy so you know Friday I was up 300 before I at the open. took a couple trades and found myself down 2000.

So today I probably makes sense just to shut it down and come back and live to trade another day. So that's it for me. Thousand dollars in the green I was green last week I'd like to be green again this week I don't have to be green every day, but I'd like to be green this week So that means uh, maybe being able to have the um, look at the big picture and say today doesn't feel like the day to push it too hard I'm gonna sit back, wait, and try again tomorrow. So that's the game plan and I'll see you guys back at it first thing tomorrow morning.

Reminder: As always, trading is risky. My results aren't typical, and there's no guarantee you'll find success. Whether you trade on your own, you'll learn from me. So take it slow and practice in a simulator.