I hope everyone understands how rallies are fueled. This one is less about the public bringing money in and building positions and more about big boys closing bad positions.

Hedge Funds Crushed By Historic Short Squeeze, Scramble Into Record Russell Calls To Offset Pain | ZeroHedge

Today ends with the first daily indecision candle on SPY since last Wednesday. But SPX never got the same indecision. It will finish below the last candle which could lead to indecision or down candles next week. Could also turn into another 11/16/23 and melt up at a slower pace.

Support is 4600, then 4540. Resistance is 4750 and then ATH.

Happy weekend!

No position taken yet on SMCI but it is on deck.

We took BOX, DBX early and received our trim levels this afternoon. We entered $TSLA calls later in the day on a signal and reached our trim level just before markets had the shake down. We also entered WMT calls on the intraday triangle breakout. It moved up into close and I think it's bottomed. Inside bar on it and closed above the 9EMA. Needs a little more to trigger long. We made 100% on WYNN yesterday and exited Jan 19 calls. Premarket look had me discussing a pullback to fill the gap. We got the flash down through gap fill and made a rare 2nd trade in it. Held the 50EMA on close, so looks good.

As far as I know (because no one has said otherwise), we had our first member 6 figure gain week! Woot

Have a great weekend!

tlh3842 said:

---

For ProgN and the other pros on here that have suggested pulling out to walk with some gains and not worry about finding the top, are you including everything (I've got QQQM and SWPPX) or just the individual stocks you've been riding up?

Totally new here and trying to soak in what I can without letting too much go over my head. It's been a nice new months, so wouldn't mind taking some official profit I'd it makes sense.

ETA: No retirement, all taxable and cash I've hand on hand in HYSAs before jumping in

---

Welcome to the clubhouse.

I don't hold any mutual funds/ETF etc. just stocks. I with H-A an think a lot of this rally is a short squeeze. Pull up a chart on the COMP, SPX and DJIA over the last 7 weeks. I preferred to sell Jan 2 and push off the tax liability but I'd be sick if I they sold off and I rode them down because of f'ing taxes. I'm in the 70-85% range in cash now across my accounts. Now I'll wait and see what the markets do next month when they start to report earnings. I'm in the camp that whatever they report and guide won't matter and they'll selloff. I want to have a stockpile of cash to buy when everyone is afraid.

Only you can decide how much cash you want to raise, but ask yourself 2 things.
1) Are you letting greed guide your decision or can you justify your holdings going higher with evidence?
2) How will you feel if you ride them back down, wishing you had lightened up so you could buy great stocks at incredible entry prices?

I'm not a daytrader nor a huge believer in just buy and hold. I'm a momentum trader and may usually make less than 20 trades in the accounts in a year. It's worked extremely well for me, but only you can decide what works for you.

Hope that helps and continue to ask questions because we all want each other to succeed and that's how we all learn.

Merry Christmas

Holy cow, guessing you have a customer for life right there.

AAPL got hit at the close into after hours on China restrictions expanding, but I have a sense that after any pullback the big money takes the opportunity to rip it over $200.

As far as being nervous, you can use puts to protect yourself from potential downside while waiting to determine market trend.

One thing I am making good strides in with members is that when you have a stock that has moved 20,30,50+ dollars, why in the heck are you so reluctant to use $1-4 of those gains to protect yourself during potential transition points.

Look at it this way. 1) If you were going to sell the stock and it runs up $10,20,30+ more are you going to care about the put premium being lost? I mean you were prepared to just be out and you might gain a net $6+ by being able to stick in the holding. 2) Even if you determine you are going to sell, why in the world would you sell it in December? You enjoy paying more capital gains this year? Instead enter a Jan 5 covered call deep on the money, so your profits are guaranteed and you either get called out and have a year to use your gains before paying the taxes. If by some crazy circumstance a $90 stock (for example) you enter a $75 covered call Jan 05.

Odds are nearly 100% it gets called out and you make a tiny bit more, due to the premium paid to you by the person calling it out. But if by some crazy happenstance it falls below $75 you pocket all the premium and own a stock at a price you'd likely be buying, without suffering all the loss.

ktownag08 said:

---

Would you guys hold big names like AAPL and AMZN or liquidate those as well? I've already got a decent cash position, but the big players on this thread are indeed making me nervous...

---

OA's approach would probably be better but I'm reluctant to recommend any use of options. Covered calls or buying protective puts are conservative moves to protect gains but in my experience it leads some to take on more riskier behavior.

If you're new to options, get approved and successful, then I've seen people like that take more risk "because they know the game". Then they will blow up their accounts. Options are beneficial but very dangerous for inexperienced investors. They're a tool, but not a poker chip. I have introduced covered calls and buying puts to several friends and then they start to gamble with puts and calls and blowup their accounts. That's why I almost never recommend options on the thread. It'd hurt me if a lurker blindly bought options off one of my posts and lost everything.

This goes for everyone, please submerge yourselves into learning options and paper trade them before you commit any money. Spoiler alert, 2-3 wins in a row doesn't mean you've found the secret because you haven't. Everyone here are professionals in what they do but I don't want any of you to blowup your accounts. In the past I have, several times, rebuilding isn't pleasant.

Here's your weekend reading. And I will preface up front, it's not an easy read. But the author does a phenomenal job, the best I've ever come across to be honest, to break down the mind bending and every man shrug inducing complicated nature of what the Federal Reserve is doing. I do believe it is from 2021. But this is an extremely important read and one that I suggest you don't just gloss over. Take 15-30 minutes where you can comfortably sit and take in the information. Try your best to truly understand it. This is almost a natural extension and deeper more technical dive (broken down in ELI5 (maybe 5 for an economist, but that's the best that can be done with this level of complication)) of The Creature From Jekyll Island, which is more of an actual ELI5 on the Federal Reserve and why it's not what you think it is. Before I post the link and what I believe are the key excerpts, I have to note that this does not mean impending doom is upon is. But if you know what's going on, you then give yourself time to prepare for whenever the bad thing comes.

And please don't just read my excerpts. They are merely to give you a small taste. Unless you are very financial savvy with a deep exposure to monetary policy, it is imperative that you read the whole article, as these excerpts are all setup with better analogies that will help you understand how and why things are happening.

I offer this up to help educate. It has helped educate me. We are all better when we are more educated and more aware. And free information like this from someone so casual at effectively explaining it has infinite worth.

The Critical Risk Of Simultaneous Inflation & Deflation by Daniel Amerman

Quote:

---

How the Federal Reserve gets the money to fund the U.S. national debt has abruptly changed in the last few weeks. The Fed has effectively "pawned" more than a trillion dollars of its most valuable assets - its ownership of U.S. Treasury obligations - through its use of reverse repurchase agreements, pledging the Treasuries as collateral to get the cash to continue to fund the federal government.

This massive pledging of assets to raise money is occurring with unprecedented size and speed. However, many people are unable to see what is happening because they are "watching the wrong crime drama". There is a popular but mistaken belief that the Federal Reserve is using a printing press to fund the government, with the new dollars simply being printed, or created from nothing with a few electronic keystrokes.

---

Quote:

---

To extend the pawnshop analogy a step further, the Fed borrowed the money to buy the collateral in the first place, call it the "guitars", and it didn't use a pawnshop, but a credit card, where it hadn't pledged the guitars as collateral. There are problems with the credit card, but the Fed still wants to keep buying guitars. So now, the Fed is pledging the guitars it had bought with the credit card, to take out new secured loans at the pawnshop, to keep the cash coming for buying still more "guitars".

Substitute "U.S. Treasury bonds and notes" for "guitars", and replace the pawnshop with the institutional fixed income marketplace, and the same financial principles apply. The Federal Reserve ran up an enormous amount of debt to increase its ownership of the national debt to over $5 trillion, at least temporary strains are developing with its unsecured borrowings, so the Fed is now taking the assets it bought with borrowed money, and pledging them as collateral to borrow the money to fund still more of the national debt.

---

Quote:

---

The numbers involved are so vast as to seem incomprehensible, but it seems like the reaction of the average person at this point - and average investor - is to say "so what?". OK, so it was yet another trillion dollars (yawn), that came from somewhere almost no one understands - who cares?

---

Quote:

---

Of course, the time will come when with 20/20 hindsight it will be blindingly obvious just how crazy things got in the early 2020s. The time will come when any person with even a scrap of common sense should have seen that investment markets and currencies that are based on a central bank borrowing unprecedented - but limited - sums of money to finance unprecedented - but unlimited - increases in the national debt would turn out to be one of the worst financial mistakes of all time. It will be abundantly clear with hindsight that having all of one's retirement savings invested in assets that are dependent on the indefinite continuation of these artificial and highly elevated markets would eventually turn out to be the mistake of a lifetime.

The issue is that we aren't living in that time, we're living in the time we are in.

Human nature is that it is just really hard for the average person to go from the times we are currently in, to the place that we are likely going. Human nature and confirmation bias can make it almost impossible for an average person to see what could be called a mass financial illusion. Now, if that illusion is being very actively supported by the most powerful elements of the government and the banking system - as it is - and if it has been in place for long enough to seem normal - as it has - then piercing that facade is going to be very difficult, and therefore will not happen for most people.

---

Quote:

---

An analogy for what has been explored in this analysis could be seeing a floor to ceiling crack develop on the back side of a concrete column, in the parking garage beneath a condominium complex - that hadn't been there the week before. Indeed, if we take another look at the "Fed Reverse Repos" graph, that is exactly what the recent weeks look like, an unprecedented crack leaping almost straight upwards.
The crack will not be seen by most. They may drive by it every day. Lives will be lived above it. It will seem entirely irrelevant. This could go on for quite a period of time, perhaps for years. But yet, major cracks like that shouldn't suddenly appear in a structurally sound building, and such a crack appearing has information value when it comes to the eventual future of the building.

The Federal Reserve effectively pawning about a trillion dollars of its ownership of the national debt in order to raise a trillion dollars in new money from new sources within about three months is a major new crack in the structural foundation of our financial system, that didn't exist before the spring of 2021. It simply didn't exist - but now it does.

---

Thanks Heineken! Going to book mark it to read this afternoon.

Red Pear Luke (BCS) said:

---

Thanks Heineken! Going to book mark it to read this afternoon.

---

You are one of the people that should have an easier time understanding. I offer up this second piece of reading for everyone, as I think it's more of a background to the first piece, and even more crucial to understanding where we are, why the way it was can not be brought back, and that we are ultimately 100% screwed. It's very sobering and makes you ask the question.. "when I sell my holdings and move to 100% cash in my investment account, a cash account hosted by the brokerage, will that value even be attainable? Will it even be that value when the Ponzi scheme eventually ends?"

This, my friends, is why you need to be stacking metals and Bitcoin as a hedge against the financial system. Not because it will happen tomorrow, next month, or next year. But because it will happen. And if you are unprepared, you will be decimated.

Counterfeiters, Con Men, Mass Illusions & Funding The National Debt by Daniel Amerman

El_duderino said:

---

TD would be Schwab now though isn't it?

---

Correct, TD is now Schwab and I hate the Schwab website platform.

El_duderino said:

---

Yeah that's what I thought. TOS is good though isn't it?

---

Yes, and their library of educational videos is excellent.

Fellas I'm in too deep on the bourbon.

Some tell me, can you trade bourbon futures? Or is that too much of a "whisky" bet?