Strike 4! ... next pitch ⚾

It takes a tremendous amount of patience to stand around at bat in the markets and just wait for your pitch.

The good news is that the only pitches that count are the ones you swing at.

Otherwise, there are no balls or strikes, just passed pitches.

Baseball metaphor aside, I usually have two categories of trade setups that I like to look out for:

An ideal and an okay.

I filter these out in my Scans by Alpha (ideal) and Bravo (okay). Not that these setups mean 100% solid trades, but all I’m doing is stacking probabilities in my favor.

That’s all the business game is anyway, stacking probabilities.

I’m a little more aggressive when the ideal setups come, because those have more probabilities stacked for me. And I’m a bit more cautious when I see only ‘okay’ setups, since they have a smaller stack of probabilities.

Good news is that my trading strategy is so forgiving, even when those setups don’t work the way I wanted them, I can still make good money.

By the way, I’m getting very close to launching my course teaching my trading strategy.

I have a date in mind this month, I’ll be sharing that with you soon.

Now, let’s play ball!

Bloomberg

Why it matters …

I don’t talk a lot about commodities, but this one cannot be ignored. Yesterday, I mentioned gold was heading toward $4,000 an ounce.  It shot through it and is up another $56 in pre-market this morning. While I am not a huge advocate of hoarding gold bars in the safe room, I would suggest you take a look at the GLD ETF. There might be some  premium to harvest there.

Comments: The market is looking green (except the DOW) after yesterday’s pullback. The almanac indicates bearish neutral for today historically. The government is still shutdown, but the only sector that seems to be noticing is travel as major airports are starting to limit traffic because of fewer air traffic controllers who really don’t want to work without getting paid. For some bizarre, unknown reason members of Congress and their staff get paid during a shutdown. Weird …

Here’s an idea from my Alpha scan going for 2.27% return on risk into next Friday’s expiration.