Transcription
Well, hey everybody. This is Alyssa. I wanted to share with you how February went for me and talk a little bit about the strategy that I used to make over $13,000 in the month of February using S&P credit spreads. All right. So, let's let's talk through it. Let's talk through all the pieces.
Each each day, I look on on um online. I look at certain things in the morning. I check out the VIX. I want to see what is the VIX doing. I want to see what has been overnight. I check out the ES, you know, overnight markets, E-Minis. I want to see what have the other indices been doing. SPY, Triple Q, IW. I'm looking there. I'm looking for news. If there's been any news happening, I want to identify that. I'm checking earnings. I want to see what who had earnings the previous night, who had earnings this more this morning. And I want to know if those earnings are going to affect the trading of the day. I'm also looking for meetings, right? Do we have FOMC meeting happening? Do we have some other announcements, PMI, PPI, CPI? Like who what meetings are we going to have? Are we getting um somebody else is going to maybe the president is going to speak? I'm looking to see what kind of things are happening today in the market, right? And I use that to help decide whether or not we're going to trade. Are we going to trade? When we're going to trade, if we're going to trade, are we waiting? For example, if FOMC is going to be in the afternoon, then I'm looking at potentially doing a trade in the morning, making sure it's closed before the 2:00 announcement, or I'll just wait until after the FOMC announcement has been made, and then I will enter a trade. All right?
So every day I'm looking at these things in the morning before the market opens. Checking out my chart, looking at previous day high, previous day low, previous week high and low, open and close of the previous day. These are some things I look at on my chart because I look at technical analysis, right? You also know I am a strat trader. I'm doing the strat for sellers. I'm looking at color, not color combinations, but number combinations, strat combinations that are my entries. I have my favorites that I really like. Um, two strategies that I use are the opening range breakout. I'm looking at the 15 or 30 minute opening range to see about trading that breakout and I trade with the trend utilizing the PDT hack, right? And then um if after I've done that, I may also look for reversals because I'm a reversals trader as well. I like reversals. I like the opening range breakout. With the opening range breakout, we want to trade with that trend, like I said, and use the PDT hack. PDT hack is a way to get around the the pattern day trader designation to be able to close your trades, lock in your profits as you go without having to use a day trade. You can only do that though in Thinker Swim, uh, Tasty Trades Tradier. Robin Hood is not a place where you can do the PDT hack. I have the whole resource you can check out in my website there. You can go get the training resource of how to use the PDT hack, but um you can't do it in a bunch of accounts. You can only do like I said, Thinker Swim, um Tasty Trades, and Trade are places where you can do the PDT hack. So, I'm using those to close and lock up my trades because I am a lock every trades kind of girl. Okay? I don't necessarily want to be in a trade if I can help it at 3:30 or 3:45 because the market can just get crazy those last 15 minutes. I'm not trying to be there if I can help it.
You also know I've talked about it in my other videos how I use gamma. I use gamma before the market opens to see what are the zones I'm watching for. You know, what is the volatility trigger, the major call wall, the major put wall. I'm looking at those before market opens as well. And then I'm using gamma throughout the day as price starts to move around. I'm using gamma to help inform where is price going, where is price not going because as a as a credit spread seller, I want to know where price is not going. All right? I'm not trying to go with the momentum per se. I just want to be where price is not going to be. Okay? I'm checking out all of those things. So, I'm looking at gamma. I'm looking at the things I mentioned already before the market opens. Okay?
Now, as I decide which strikes or which stock, which trades I want to take, I'm looking for um two sets of strikes earlier in the day when there's good trending movement, I may be more aggressive with my strikes because I'm you going to use the PDT hack to close them up. As the day progresses though, I probably won't be I'm not as aggressive. I'm looking more for safe strikes. trading morning session, afternoon session. Generally in the middle 11 to 12:30, 1:00 is a time that I don't really enter a lot of trades. By that time, I'm closing up the morning trades and really waiting for afternoon because the lunchtime, as people always say, is like the chop zone and you don't want to get chopped up while you're waiting and then the afternoon session starts and before you know it, your strikes have been blown through. That is not what we're after as sellers, right?
What are some of the indicators that I use? Well, I use the Strat um assistant, one of the ed one of the indicators that tell me the numbers and stuff on my on my chart. Um I use VWAP. VWAP is a key indicator for me. I'm looking to see where is price coming back to, where it's going to try to come back as mean reversion. You can see the VWAP on Trading View. You can't really see it on Think or Swim because VWAP is based on um price of a stock and S&P doesn't really have shares, but you can see it on Trading View. All right. So, I'll use VWAP during the day to because I know price is going to try to come back to the average and mean reversion throughout the day. Uh I also use a fair value gaps indicator. It's going to help me. I use moving averages. I try not to use a whole lot of indicators because I don't like my chart to be super crowded. I try to keep it as minimal as possible. Those are some of the indicators that I use.
And when I'm entering a trade, I'm thinking about how am I going to get out of this trade I'm in? How am I getting out? Am I getting out with profits? If I'm if I'm doing profits, how how am I getting out with profits? Do I have a plan for how many how much I want profits from this trade? Am I exiting this trade based on where the chart reverses or however that goes? Um, and what am I doing if the trade goes against me? When am I getting out for a loss? When am I closing it up? And I again, use a chart for this, but this is something you need to think about before you enter this trade. What's my entry? What's my exit? making sure that you're doing proper risk management because that's something that we focus on in our community, my membership, is proper risk management, not sizing too heavy, not especially not so much that if it bothers you mentally, you're in you're too big. Your your trade is too large, right? Um what's your plan? Are you trading where you can focus? Is if you can't pay attention to S&P, this is probably a time that you shouldn't be trading it. SPX is not a set it and forget it kind of trade. No, that some stuff you might be able to do that. SPX is not zero DTE. That's not the way to trade SPX. If you know you can't watch it, this is not the time to trade it. If you know you've got a window of time that you can watch this trade, do what it's supposed to do, that's a good time. But if you know you're distracted or something else is going on, that's not trading time for you. This is a reason why several people have signed up for copy trading with me because they realize that they can't watch S&P each day, but they really want to benefit from the trading of S&P. So, they've done copy trading where I do the work and they just let their money work for them, right? They don't they're not actively trading it.
So, you're asking yourself, should I trade today based on all the things that are going on in the data, the news, events, whatever is happening, are you going to trade today? Are you available to trade today? Are you going to be distracted? Do you have other things to do? If so, this may not be the day to trade. You can always stand down. We get to trade. We don't have to trade every single day. Even though I generally do trade most days, but there are some days I trade very light or I wait till the afternoon or I only trade in the morning. These are things you have to address for yourself. Okay.
Now, you have zero DTE as an option, which means you're trading today and you're exiting today. That is another level of stress. It's harder on the system, harder on your mentals because if you the move doesn't if you make a the move, it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of time to make adjustments when you're doing zero DTE. So, what we do is some one DTE as well. I'll do zero DTE trading today and then I'll do some one DTE that's entering today and closing tomorrow with a plan to close tomorrow. That gives you more time to make adjustments if you need to the next day when the when the when the when the trading day opens. If it works for you, then you can make some moves. If it's if price if it's going in your way, you could just close it up. No day trade required. No worries. One DTE, two DTE, 5 DTE, right? I have a whole strategy that covers how do we pick strikes for subsequent days if you're not going to trade zero DTE. I've got a strategy for that.
So, I just talked through the few things kind of superficially, but I covered it pretty good. What do I look at in the morning? How do I pick my strikes? What's a strategy that I'm looking at? What are some indicators that I'm using? What's my risk management? Am I doing zero DTE, one plus DTE, etc., etc. All right, copy trading membership. I have a whole whole resource that walks through all of this specifically like I give you bom exactly what I use, exactly when I use it, exactly how I do it. All of that is together in a full resource. I'm going to put the link in the description and you can come and check out what is Alyssa's entire strategy. I'm going tell you, it's a full run through of my strategy um of what exactly do we do each day and each week in order to trade S&P. I'll make sure that the link is in the description and you can go ahead and grab that. It comes with uh a playbook. So, you've got videos that you can look at and you've got something written, a written playbook that you can have. I get I've added that to it as a a a bonus, right? A bonus for you is a nice playbook where it's in written form. All right, so go ahead and avail yourself to that. Make sure that you like and subscribe the video, do all the things. You can find me in all the social media places. I am educator to trader. I am Alyssa and I will see you all in the market. Bye.