Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to be talking about earnings surprises, what they are and I want to share three examples with you. Now, the key thing to understand about earnings surprises is that they can happen in either direction and it doesn't necessarily always have to be this difference between what analysts or Wall Street expects the company to make and what they actually make. In fact, a lot of earnings surprises can come as a result of guidance that the company has or based on the underlying expectation of actual market participants. What do I mean by saying all this? Well, when a company announces earnings, typically what will happen is you will also have some of these big companies that are followed by research analysts. And so, a research analyst might publish their expectation of where the company's revenue and earnings and growth should be for this quarter. Now, all of these research analysts pull their numbers together and basically, we get this consensus estimate. You know, what is the mass of research community, what do they think the earnings per share are going to be, the revenue growth, the top line revenue, etcetera. And so, that builds the basis for where the benchmark is for that company. But when a company surprises, they usually have a number that is significantly higher or significantly lower than what research analysts expect as a consensus. And so, that causes the stock to either jump or fall based on that differential. But what also might happen is we also might see that the stock might beat earnings estimates, meaning that the stock might actually outperform earnings estimates, but still fall because even though it outperformed what analysts thought it would do, it still wasn't enough for the actual market. That often happens as well and that can cause a lot of traders to kind of scratch their heads and wonder what is actually happening. Now, at the same time, we also can have companies that will issue different guidance after they announce earnings. Even though their earnings might have been great or better than expected, they may now issue guidance that says that they expect next quarter's earnings to be lower. And so, that revises their forward-looking projections which obviously has an impact on the stock price.

When we look at three examples… I'll just bring up three general case studies, but you can look at a lot of these examples because they happen all the time. But the ones I'm going to talk about right now are Apple, Tesla and Facebook. Tesla just recently in the last couple of quarters, went through an earnings event where the company announced earnings, the top line revenue was great and the company actually opened higher than expected. But then actually, as the company started to get into its conference call and started to provide guidance, the stock actually closed about $40 lower on the day. In this case, you had literally two earnings surprises in the same actual trading day. It was very hard to trade Tesla probably during that day. In the same vein, what we've seen before time and time again with Apple is we've seen Apple have above average earnings, above consensus or Wall Street estimates in as far as their earnings per share or revenue growth and still, the stock traded lower. In fact, this has happened at least six times before in the past where Apple has outperformed the market as far as expectations, but has actually traded lower. And so, the reason is because it's still not at the same growth rate or it's still not at a growth rate that people truly expect Apple to be hitting at. Apple may have outperformed what analysts expected, but it's still not outperforming what actual investors have expected. In the last vein or I guess the last example here with Facebook, what we've seen recently with Facebook is Facebook has done the same thing with Apple, except it's gone about it just a little bit differently in that Facebook has usually outperformed its expectations. In many cases, analysts are catching up to this outperformance and pricing Facebook accordingly, but what we're seeing in Facebook is dramatically different changes in guidance. And so, last quarter, Facebook had a huge surprise where its guidance and its expectations were much lower because of all the privacy and policy issues out there and the stock basically opened down around 175 when the previous day's close was 218, so a huge dramatic surprise, again, mostly around the expectation of future growth because the earnings were up on the quarter. It actually made more money on the quarter and year over year, but it's the expectation in this future growth.

What does all of this mean if we just kind of wrap this up? The hard truth about earnings is that you have no predictive power over where the company is going or where the stock is going. In fact, we've done a lot of research on this and we'll be publishing our earnings trading research report that talks about how you can trade these earning strategies. But one of the things that we learn in that research is that we truly have no idea where a company is going. There's usually about a 50-50 chance of a company making a move up or down regardless of the situation, environment, expectations, consensus estimates. All of that stuff rolled into it, it's still just a coin flip. Hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to answer a question, "How long does it take to learn options trading the right way?" This is a tough one because I know there's a lot of options trading education out there and I would like to tell you that it takes literally no time at all to learn how to trade options, but it's just not the truth. You can't learn how to trade options overnight and you certainly can't learn how to trade options at a weekend or a multi-day seminar or a boot camp. It's just not going to get ingrained into your mind and you're not going to understand and really believe in the concepts in that short amount of time as much cramming as you try to get in. I think that options trading is truly probably a six to eight week process to learn. I think there's concepts that you have to master and you have to give your subconscious and conscious mind time to basically absorb and learn some of these concepts and methodologies, the terminology that is required to be successful as an options trader.

Some people might catch things and learn at a much faster pace and some people might take a little bit longer, but I think somewhere around six to eight weeks is probably about as long as you need to really master some of the big rocks and main components. Now, I can truly tell you that it will take much longer to master the intricate details of options trading that might come after a course of a couple of years or even a decade or so in this business. I truly am learning new things about the market all the time and new things about option strategies or different ways at looking at options pricing or how options pricing has evolved in different market environments and situations. That's always a constant and ever evolving path for me, but I think understanding the core concepts, the core methodology and foundation of options trading really probably takes about six to eight week. Luckily for you and for many people who listen to this podcast, we've basically laid out that entire process on our website through the tracks and certification program, so that you can basically go through this at the right pace and in the right order and again, all totally free at Option Alpha. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to go answer the question, "What's the difference between an iron butterfly and an iron condor?" Structurally, there's only one real difference between these strategies and I'm not going to get into the basics or to the pricing principles between them or how they interact in different markets. But as far as how they're structured and how they're built, iron butterflies are different than iron condors in that iron butterflies have the exact same short strike on both the call and put side and iron condors on the other hand, have different short strikes for calls and puts. For example, if we have a stock trading at $100, the iron butterfly strategy might sell the 100 strike call and the 100 strike put option and then buy options out on either end say at 105 on the call side and 95 on the put side.

An iron condor on the other hand, might sell the 99 strike put and sell the 101 strike call option, so not the same strike and then similarly, buy the same 105 call and 95 put option. You'll notice that the iron butterfly and the iron condor could conceivably trade the same long strikes and could conceivably trade similar short strikes, but an iron butterfly trades the exact same inside short strikes and an iron condor trades different inside short strikes. If you think about them as actually, their synthetic main components or original components being straddles and strangles, that's where you get those inside short strikes for iron butterflies and iron condors respectively and a straddle is selling the same strike price at both the call and the put side. With a strangle, you're selling different strike prices on the call and the put side. As always, hopefully this helps out. If you have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to go through the Thinkorswim Account Info Basics Guide which is basically my fancy way of just saying, "We're going to tell you what all those numbers in the account info box on the top left-hand corner of your Thinkorswim platform actually means." There's a couple of different things inside of that box. It can be confusing because there's a lot of numbers trailing around in there, buying power, day trading limit, cash and sweep. And so, what we want to do is help you understand what each of those boxes means. Again, if you're logged in to your Thinkorswim platform on your desktop or you can even see this I believe in your mobile platform, this is what you'll see in that top left-hand corner. It's the account info box which you can toggle open and you can move around in your platform.

The first box there is the option buying power box or at least it's the first box for me because I actually have option buying power approval on my account. And basically, what that does is that tells you how much money you have to go out and in many cases, buy options or sell options. Now, I think they should honestly rename this. Instead of option buying power just because that has this connotation that you should be buying options with this, I think it should be options trading power, so the available funds you have to trade options, whether you buy options or whether you choose to sell options, but that's just me being nitpicky. But that's exactly what it is. It tells you that you have that amount of money to go out and start actively trading options.

Now, the next one, there's a dropdown box in that one and the dropdown box for net liquidity and day trading power basically shows you how much you have in net liquidity for your account. Now, the net liquidity box is a rolling five-day basis that tells you how much money you've had in your account should you liquidate everything that you're trading right now, meaning if all the positions were closed and reversed, that current prices, how much money would you be left over with? Now, this to me is the most important one because this tells us exactly how much or how little our account is growing in the future. As much options trading activities you have with all commissions rolled in, everything in there, your net liquidity should be growing and that means that you should be generating money after commissions and after expenses and losing trades and all those things going out into the future, so to me, this is the most important box. Now, this also means that when I talk about position sizing, I'm always talking about position sizing as it relates to net liquidity and that is because at the end of the day, if you closed out all your positions, how much you left with, that's how much you should be basing your position sizing on.

Now, I skipped over one in the top, so we'll go right back to it. But when you actually click on the option buying power or stock buying power, whatever your account shows, there is another box that will show or should show stock buying power and what this will do is this will show you how much available funds you have if you were to also include margin as a part of your stock buying strategy. If you do have a margin account and if you're able to trade on margin, not necessarily that I think you should, then that'll show in the stock buying power. It's usually at least double what you have in your option buying or liquidity remaining for the account, but sometimes, it could be more.

The third box down on my side is day trading buying power. And so, what this tells you is this tells you how much funds you have available if you were to day trade a bunch of contracts back and forth or a bunch of stock back and forth. This is important because if you do get into the business of day trading where you're actively trading lots of contracts in and out, you want to take a look at this because the brokers will limit your available day trading power because what happens is that even though you might day trade in and out of a couple of hundred shares here and there, those trades still have to clear through all the exchanges and they don't happen instantly and sometimes, they can take a little bit of time to clear. They want to make sure that all those trades do in fact clear before you have the ability to trade more funds. Now, this day trading power is typically much higher than your net liquidity and in many cases, much higher than your options or stock buying power because they know in many cases that all of these trades will clear and should clear very easily, so they give you a lot of leeway to do that. Now, again, this is mostly for accounts that have day trading power which is generally over $25,000.

The next rundown, number four down on our account info tab is cash and sweep vehicle. This is exactly what it sounds like. It's basically the cash that's in your account, whether it's cash remaining or cash that you've collected from option premium selling and it's the cash that the brokers allow to move in and out of the sweep vehicle. The sweep vehicle is just a fancy way of saying, "Look. In many cases, many brokers, specifically Thinkorswim will move the cash, excess cash in your account to basically like a holding tank for all accounts and they lend that money out to other people, collect interest on it and then they give you a portion of that." Now, don't get too crazy and get all worked up. It's very, very small interest. It's a very low risk, low investment that they're doing. But they're moving your cash back and forth between all of these sweep vehicles, so that it allows you to gain a little bit of interest, just very small amount of interest on the amount of cash that's just sitting in your account, waiting to be deployed.

Now, the last box is your available funds for trading and this is important because the available funds for trading is very similar too or should be almost exactly the same as your option buying power, but it also tells you how much is available after the inclusion of a bunch of margin and if you have bought margin on stock or bought options on margin, it will include that as well and how much money you have left over to basically work with. Now, if this number gets too low, that's when you start running into these maintenance calls or margin calls that you typically hear about all the time. My suggestion has always been that you keep your account at 50% max allocation and that means that available funds for trading should generally be around 50% of your net liquidity. And if you do that, I think you should be okay. I think you won't over-allocate. You'll have plenty of cash, plenty of cushion to withstand a lot of margin fluctuations or volatility fluctuations in the future. Hopefully this has been a good little overview. As always, if you guys have questions on the Thinkorswim platform, please let us know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we are going to be talking about maintenance margin requirement basics and specifically talking about how they relate to trading stocks. We'll cover in a future podcast some maintenance margin requirements and how margin works for options trading, but I wanted to get back to basics, so you guys have a building block and a foundation of understanding first how maintenance margin works for traditional stock purchases. When you actually open up a margin account and most brokers require now at least $2,000 to open up a margin account, what that does is that allows you then to buy stock on margin and it's just a fancy way for brokers and investors to basically say, "Buy stock with the help of a loan." Now, you don't have to do this and I definitely don't suggest necessarily that people do this because it can amplify the gains, but it can also amplify the losses. But when you buy stock on margin, you are basically putting up half of the value of stock in most cases and then the broker is allowing you to borrow the other half of the value of stock and buy the rest of the shares. For example, if a stock is trading at $100 and you want to buy 100 shares, you would basically only really be paying for 50 shares. The broker would then allow you to borrow the money to purchase the other 50 shares which in theory, frees up a lot more capital for you to go out and invest elsewhere. Instead of buying 100 shares of one stock, you can now buy 50 shares of one and 50 of another and because you've done it in a margin account, the brokers allow you to do this. Each broker has their own different requirements. Some are 50%, some are 25%, some are 75%, some are 70% minimum requirements for the initial margin that you purchase.

What happens then is that after this trade starts going on and let's say the stock starts to decline in value because that's always the worst-case scenario, what happens is that you start losing your equity first. The brokers know that their margin is protected. If they gave you say a $5,000 loan to purchase the rest of the shares of stock, that $5,000 does not decline in value as the stock goes down. It's not like you guys are 50-50 partners on this thing on the way down. This is the conception I think most people have. When you get into a margin requirement trade, the loan that the broker gives you stays in place. It's very much like real estate. If you buy a piece of real estate and you borrow $100,000 from the bank, well, if the value of the real estate goes down, that $100,000 is still owed to the bank and the same thing happens in a margin situation with a broker. As a stock is going down in value, now your equity goes down in value as well. And so, what happens is you reach these maintenance margin requirement levels which many brokers might even set them at typically 30%. That means that when your equity gets down below 30% of the initial price, plus the full margin amount, you get what's called a margin call and you have to basically put some more equity back into this position, so that it's not getting too low, so you're not running out of potential equity and the broker is left with nothing. And so, that's where you hear all these horror stories in some cases about margin requirements and margin calls and people not being able to cover them because maybe they have a lot of margin securities and they've all gone down in value. That's really what it is. It's just this minimum level that says, "Look. You're getting short or slim on the equity that you have left in the position. You need to sell something else or deliver some more cash to be able to cover this position."

Now, again, this is mainly focused today based on stock trading and stock investing. We'll do another podcast in the future that talks about how it works a little bit more with options trading. It's the same general concepts with options trading, except we don't actually borrow money in the case of options trading. You just basically set aside money in your account versus borrowing it from the broker, so that's the big distinction. But hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to be answering the question, "What does BP effect in stocks mean or more specifically, what does buying power effect in stocks mean?" When you're actually trading, it's actually pretty simple to understand. But when you're trading, whether it's stocks or underlying options, whether you're buying options, selling options, doing simple strategies or complex strategies, all that BP or buying power effect means is that is the amount of money that comes out of your account or gets set aside in your account to cover that position. Now, I say that it's two of those because it's not necessarily both. That money is always coming out of your account. For example, if you buy stock, money would come out of your account for the purpose of purchasing shares of that stock. Now, you have stock that's valued at the same amount as where you purchased the shares, but you actually forfeited the right to the money by buying the shares and delivering money to somebody else. In the same way, when you are buying options, whether a single strategy or an option spread, money goes out of your account and gets transferred to the option seller in exchange for the options contracts.

Now, where this is a little bit confusing sometimes is where it comes into play with option selling. When you are doing an option selling strategy, whether you're selling an individual contract or you are a net seller of a spread, you do still see a buying power effect in your account. And so, what people often get confused on is – "Well, what happens? Because I'm not actually buying anything, so I'm just selling options. Why is there a reduction in my buying power?" And the reduction in your buying power comes into play because the brokers know that you have to have a certain amount of money in your account to cover the potential risk in the position. For example, I'm just looking at EWZ right now because we're actually trading EWZ right now. But if I was to sell a simple $1 wide spread in EWZ and I took in a credit of $27, my buying power effect that would come out of that account would be about $73 per spread that I'm selling. If I did 10 contracts, I did $730 in buying power effect. Now, again, that's not money that's actually being transferred out of my account in this case. I'm not delivering that to anybody because I am the option seller. I'm selling the spread. But what happens is that the broker basically set aside this money and say, "Look. You can't trade with this chunk of money, this little sub-grouping of money because it's used to cover this EWZ position if it were to go bad."

That's what buying power effect really tells you. It tells you how much money you have left to basically buy or sell options or to get into all these positions. And so, once your buying power effect goes all the way to zero, you don't have any ability to get into new existing positions. You basically are forced then to start closing positions to liquidate some cash. Hopefully that helps out. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to answer the question now, "What is the difference between VXX and UVXY?" In yesterday's daily call podcast, we talked about VIX versus VXX. Today, we're going to be talking about the differences between VXX and UVXY. Now, there's a lot that we could get into and we'll try to narrow it down as much as possible, but the main difference between these two because they are both still ETNs and they do trade like ETFs and like ETNs, you can buy and sell them, you can trade options on them, etcetera, but the main difference is that UVXY is leveraged. This could work to your advantage, depending on which direction you're trading it or it could work to your disadvantage.

What happens with VXX is that VXX holds unleveraged positions in Vix futures. It would consider typically, sell the front month contracts that it's long and then buy the back month contracts to replace. Well, in the case of UVXY, they hold a leveraged position, sometimes 1.5. I know it's changed before. It was higher. I think it went down. But they hold a leveraged position in the Vix futures which means that it's generally going to be a little bit more volatile in pricing than VXX and that means in both directions.

We've talked about on the weekly podcast the advantage or disadvantage to these pro or ultra ETNs basically that have these leveraged positions and how they work in either direction, so I would encourage you to go back through the weekly podcast to check out that show that we did. But again, that's really the main difference, is that that leverage creates some additional drag which could, like I said, in times of high volatility, be very beneficial if you're long volatility, but if you're short volatility, it could also work to your advantage unless you're using it as a hedge. Hopefully that helps out. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to be answering the question, "What's the difference between VIX which is the Vix and VXX?" The first thing you have to understand is that these two things are not the same. I think actually, a lot of people interchangeably use VIX or VXX when they mean one or the other, but not the same. Now, they are different products, but they use the different, I guess underlying to track and trade. The first one is the Vix. The Vix in and of itself is not something that you can necessarily trade directly. You can trade options on it, you can trade futures on the Vix, but you can't trade VIX itself. You can't buy VIX in the open market. And what the Vix does is just simply track implied volatility on a 30-day basis for the S&P 500. You could think of it as the implied volatility reading or chart of the S&P 500.

Now, the difference here is that VXX in an ETN. And so, VXX, you can trade, you can short, you can buy long, you can also trade options on it, but what the VXX does is it replicates a forward position in VIX by buying futures and then selling and rolling those futures on an ongoing basis. And because it's basically selling front and buying back month futures on a continuous basis, it has this negative drag or this downward spiral that it will always be in based on its current pricing or its current structure. And so, for me, it's really interesting when people start interchangeably using them because they actually talk about them in completely different context and use them in completely different ways. Again, the VIX is something that you can trade options on, but you would probably actually do yourself a better service to trade options on VXX which has pretty decent volume as well and also has this negative drag that's based on its pricing structure or how it's built. Hopefully that helps out in understanding the differences between them. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to be talking about the first machine-learning AI technology for retail traders, one that we are coining, OTIS. It was hard to decide what I was going to follow up show number 365 which was our one-year review of the daily call podcast and I figured the best thing is to talk about this new technology which is truly the most exciting thing that I have been kind of working on with our team and something that I'm really excited to get out to you guys here in the next couple of months. But we've hinted at this in a couple of different areas, not only on the podcast, but also on our Facebook Live channel, also in the membership area and the forum. But our team has developed what I think is one of the coolest pieces of technology and that is a deep-learning AI technology for the stock market. Now, this is something that's not new to the stock market. If you're thinking to yourself, "Well, I've heard of this before. I've seen this before." it's probably true. You have heard of AI technology. You have heard of deep-learning computer machine-learning and it has been applied to the stock market in numerous instances. The difference is that what we are trying to do is release the first ever public open display for retail traders of how this technology works and what the actual outputs of this technology end up being.

What you see many times with AI technology in the finance world, especially in the stock market or in the options trading market is that this technology is reserved or in a black box for hedge funds or high frequency trading shops and our goal is to basically break that box wide open and give people the ability to not only see how we build our machine-learning technology, what inputs we used, what data went into it, but also to understand how this can potentially generate some better signals or at least more confidence in some of the trades that we're doing. Now, we posted, like I said before, some of this information already on some of our Facebook channels and inside of our groups with elite and pro members and what I can tell you right now is that the way that the machine-learning technology works is that it's reading and crunching market data and then trying to figure out correlations between them in very Layman's terms and try to figure out a predictive model for where the stock might go in the future. Now, we know that these breakthrough models are never going to be 100% chance of success or 100% confidence, but if we can get it to around 60%, 65% confidence with a small margin of error, then we're going to be basically developing something that nobody have seen in the retail space for average traders like me and you, people that trade for ourselves, the self-directed investors. This has never been done before on this scale.

And what I think is really cool about this is that we can not only take this technology and basically publicly display it and show everyone how it works and what the signals are, but then couple this with our auto-trading technology, so that we have two mechanisms that work together. Now, what we've done is we've basically developed a profile around this, if you will and we're calling it OTIS which stands for Options Trading Integrated System or Intellectual System. And so, our idea is that OTIS as the person or a man or whoever he is becomes basically the figure this of this, our little bot guy. It's that OTIS will have the ability to now add some predictive power to our auto-trading platform. If we have a stock that we're looking at, OTIS will have the ability to say, "Okay. Where do we think the stock might go with a 60% confidence and a small margin for error in the next month or two months and then how can we build a trade around that?" and let the system basically auto-trade it. It's taking a lot of different elements of trading that we've been wanting to integrate into auto-trading and technology and computer deep-learning, science and bringing them all together under one roof which I think is insanely powerful and really, really cool. We're super excited about it. We'll have more details on it. But for us, this was the first, I guess public display and declaration of what we're doing here with OTIS. I hope you guys enjoy it. I would definitely love to hear your comments and your feedback once you see more of the stuff that we'll have rolling out to you guys in the next couple of weeks. As always, hopefully you guys enjoyed this and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we are reaching the one-year review and update for the daily call. First of all, I want to say thank you for those of you who've been with me this entire journey. It was a long 365 days, but a very much enjoyable process for me. I really like doing the daily call. I really like publishing them and hitting on different topics that we don't generally have an opportunity to touch on in some of our training and some of our content that we put out at Option Alpha. Now, in today's review, what I want to go through are some stats, some of the growth and some of the top shows that we've seen over the last year and also some themes that we might have moving forward on the podcast. Now, I am going to be continuing to do the daily call podcast, so it's not going to be ending at all by any stretch and we hope to continue it for many years and I want to talk about some of the themes that we're going to be going through as we progress.

Now, first of all, the first thing I will say is we do have a ton of reviews, but we do not yet have enough reviews of people who listen to the podcast. Here are some of the stats and then I will push you again to go over and leave us a review or a rating on iTunes because again, that's the best place to leave a review or rating. It also helps get this podcast into the hands of people who are just like you. If you've been enjoying the daily call podcast, please take just a couple of minutes right now and head on over to iTunes or Google Play, SoundCloud, Stitcher or wherever you listen to the podcast and please leave us a review and a rating. We got about 120 five star reviews already on iTunes at least at the time that I'm recording this one and we have on every single day, around 3,000 to 5,000 people downloading this podcast. That varies based on the topic and the day of the week, but it's usually somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people that are downloading the show. Again, a very small portion of you guys who are listening. You know who you are. I'm speaking to you right now. Yes, you in the mirror right now, sitting in the car or driving or at the gym. Please go ahead and leave us a review and a rating.

Just to give you some broad stats on some of the growth that we've seen… In the last year, just over the last year, the podcast has been downloaded more than half a million times. We've had a lot of downloads. Every single month, we're growing at an exponential rate. We've seen downloads in June around like 59,000, July, 67,000 downloads, August, 74,000, September at the time that we're actually releasing this right now, over 95,000. We are growing in a very, very quick pace which to me just means that we're hitting the right chords, I guess or hitting the right topics of discussion and the right themes because it seems like people are reaching these shows and listening to them more often. Now, I did go back through our stats and kind of tracking where all of the downloads come in and I think it's pretty interesting, some of our top shows. What I wanted to do was encourage you to go back and listen to some of these shows if you have not already. A lot of these shows have been more recent shows which is interesting because to me, it's interesting that a lot of the recent shows are actually our top shows and not only because people have downloaded them, but also because they seem to be far and above some of the more popular topics that we've discussed.

Some of the top shows that we've had are, "Buying options with a 70% chance of success." Show number 301. Show number 285, "Zero-risk option trade. Is it possible?" And yes. Show number 228, "The unconventional guide to trading options with $500." Show number 326, "How do you make money selling options?" Show number 262, "The cheapest options trading brokers." Show number 279, "How do I become an options trader?" Show number 276, "What are the best trading tools?" And show number 340, "Why broker platforms suck and what we are doing about it." That would encourage you, I guess like I said, just to go back through and kind of revisit some of these top shows. Maybe you skipped over them. I know that sometimes it can be a lot to listen to these every single day even though they're four to five minutes in length in some cases. But if you have, I definitely want to encourage you to go back through and listen to some of these more recent shows.

Now, as far as themes moving forward and I think this is really important, one I thrive off of your guys' input, your comments, your insights… I would encourage you, please, not only do not stop doing what you're doing for those of you who are helping out and sending in suggestions. But if you're listening to this right now and you've got some question in your mind, you don't know if we've answered it before, just let me know. That's really all it's about. Whatever questions you have, whatever topics, curiosity bugs that are crawling around in your mind, please let me know because if we have covered it, I'll point you in the right direction and if we haven't and in many cases, we haven't, we'll add it to the queue for the daily call or for our regular weekly podcast. I would first encourage you, please let me know whatever avenue is best for you. You can send me a Facebook message, you can Tweet at us, Instagram, Pinterest, send us an email. You can do whatever you want. Just get your questions, get your topics, get your questions into us and comments because that's really what we thrive off of.

What I want to start focusing on more as we start moving forward is a lot of the intricacies of strategies. What you'll see with us is a lot of intricacies on the different types of products that are out there, things like, "What's the difference between VIX and VXX? What's the difference between VXX and UVXY?" And then you'll also see a lot of commentary on quick guides. What I wanted to do was have these quick little mini guides on what is an iron condor and how do you trade it or how to roll a position, things that you can really digest in a short amount of time that we don't have to dig down into a bunch of details and case studies. Now, speaking of case studies, I want to start doing more of those on the daily podcast, talking about the potential trades that we've either gotten into or out of without going into too many specifics, but talking through just scenarios that we've been through. In fact, right now as we're recording this, we've just recently exited a huge EWW position that we've been rolling for months and months and months and ended up taking it off at some pretty decent profits after rolling and that was actually a pretty good little case study. I want to start talking about more of those that don't require necessarily these huge long drawn out podcast.

But as always, I'm always looking for more ideas, always looking for your guys' input. For those of you, like I said, that have been on the journey with me the entire year, all 365 days, we have not missed a single day of this podcast which is pretty incredible and that was one of my first goals starting out. I thank you so much. Always humbled to have your ear and have your insight and be with you on this journey. Until next time, happy trading.