Tutorials

Could you use an extra $40,000 to help pay the bills in 2019? Then check out the no-big-deal trade that we did in NFLX -- a counterintuitive (CI) short on a dull day when we were determined to force a trade no matter what. And so we did. We called up a NFLX chart simply because it was one of the few stocks that was moving that morning . Lo, there was a fully ripened CI set-up just waiting to be harvested. We entered the trade moments later and were able to take a partial profit within a minute or two. This gambit was worth as much as $220, although we went onto to other things with just $160 of it covered. Do just one of these little “nothing” trades each day and it will add up to $40,000 by the end of the year.

On a very slow day, we worked especially hard to force a trade. We found one in an unaccustomed place – a ‘counterintuitive’ (CI) short in Newmont Mining that produced a small ($120) but satisfying real-money gain for several students. (For the record, they covered most of it a few hours later at the 31.31 midpoint support of the pattern.) One factor that led us to the trade was the price of the stock – at around $31, a cheapie relative to AMZN, GOOG, NFLX and some others we typically look at during these sessions. We also discussed some tentative high-leverage plays for Friday’s expiration, but precise strategies could not be formulated so far in advance.

During our hour together we turned the rules upside down to come away with a profitable trade in the E-Mini S&Ps. As most of you will already know, the best way to trade the nasty little sonofabitch is to use patterns in which the A-B impulse leg is a “bad” one. In practice this means it has failed to exceed a prior ‘external’ peak as we normally require. That would only get the algos salivating, and we never want to bump heads with math majors. It took a second try to get aboard using the one-minute chart, but watch the trade in real time and you’ll see how flouting the rules produced a quick winner on a slow day.

You’ll be itching to trade after you’ve checked out this recording, since the session contains a couple of ultra-low-risk scalps. One of them was a minutely explained entry in AAPL on the one-minute chart. These are exactly the kinds of trades many of you who are new to the Hidden Pivot Method have been looking for. The important thing to keep in mind is that any trading strategy that makes you $100 a day can just as easily make you $1,000. Over time as your confidence grows, you will want to grow your size and perhaps trade less.

Not every trade attempted during these tutorial sessions comes up a winner, as you will surmise from this recording. Even so, as long as we regard the inevitable losing trades as stepping stones to even bigger winners, we should have little trouble giving away spare change now and then to traders who, at least on that day, were more deserving than we. If you’re interested trading Hidden Pivot levels using option spreads, you can skip to the Q&A session at the end. We looked at two stocks, Square and Intel, with the goal off staking out bearish positions with risk very tightly controlled.

The stock market was having a bad hair day, with turgid price action that could not have satisfied either bulls or bears. We pondered a ‘mechanical’ trade in the E-Mini S&P's that began well but ended badly. Although the setup looked good on the hourly chart, the five-minute bars revealed some problems that we might have noticed if only we’d looked in the right place. There’s also some material here on calculating options price without using a mathematical model.

This lesson is guaranteed to spark your interest in timed buy- and sell-stop (TBSS) entries. I have taught this tactic as one of five Hidden Pivot entry methods, but de-emphasized it in recent years because it seemed less useful than the other four: conventional, mechanical, camouflage and counterintuitive. Watch the two perfect TBSS set-ups we considered here and you may find yourself doing nothing but TBSS trades. The technique cannot be taught with static Powerpoint slides because the logic behind it is not only dynamic, but quite subtle. However, TBSS does explicitly use conventional Hidden Pivot levels in a way that can open the door to many opportunities we might otherwise discard. It also offers a chance to reduce entry risk to even lower levels than are possible with 'camouflage'.

This lesson is pretty boring and nearly fruitless, although someone mentioned in the chat room that during our hour together I had nailed a low in AAPL within two pennies using some fancy Hidden Pivotry. The technique is here to be examined, and – who knows – you might come across a similar pattern at some point and make money on it because you remembered the one in this lesson. In any event, consider it optional.

This session literally paid off for students, since many of them reported doubling or even tripling their money in mere hours after buying some VXX puts for just 0.04. The opportunity looked so juicy that double-, then triple-checked the option price before giving the green light to buy them. Hundreds were offered for 0.04 before they took off, so anyone could have filled the order. Our ability to exploit such opportunities should serve as a reminder of why these “graduate studies” sessions each Wednesday are so important and useful, especially for those who are able to attend during market hours.