Up nicely.

We won’t get to the LTP until Thursday (hopefully!) but it’s up just about 400% ($2.5M), which is very nice for 17 months and the STP is done and it’s “only” up 120% in the same 17 months, so $441,710 at the moment (8am) and that’s getting very close to 3M and that’s too many Dr. Evils and the market is toppy so – should we shut down? We started with $200,000 in the STP and $700,000 in the LTP so we’re up $2.1M (300%) overall in 17 months and you KNOW that’s not sustainable – so why risk it?  

It does depend on your risk tolerance but, if $3M is a lot of money to you – then PLEASE do not leave it all on the table.  At least get 1/2 out and let the CASH!!! protect you in the event of a pullback.  We may keep going up but you’ll still end up with 75% of the potential gains – while avoiding 50% of the potential losses should the market pull back.  

In fact, the first thing we’re going to do here in the STP is spend money to help lock in the LTP gains.  I’m NOT going to cash out the portfolios because I don’t feel that strongly that we’re going to pull back (yet!) but I do strongly feel that that is not an appropriate risk for people who have more than 50% of their assets in the market right now. For those people – I strongly suggest taking half off the table and ABSOLUTELY we will find more things to trade – during and after the current Earnings Season.

Meanwhile, in our September 17th Review, we left the S&P at 5,633 and the LTP/STP paired portfolios were at $2,746,604. Now we’re at 5,859 and that’s up 226 points (4%) for the month and, as you can see – we’ve punched over the projected top of our range at 5,600 and, as I noted yesterday, we’re now at 26.3x forward earnings on the S&P and that’s 63% higher than the “normal” 16x the S&P trades at.  Something has to give!  

That RSI line is back to 69.11 and 70 is the danger zone on that index and look at MACD – also pushing it’s limits. Will Q3 earnings be so spectacular and Q4 guidance be so giddy that we’ll ignore all these warning signs and keep barreling ahead towards 40x earnings OR will even the tiniest bump in the road send us hurtling off the valuation cliff we’re approaching like Thelma and Louise?  

With that in mind, let’s take a look at our Portfolios:  

$700/Month Portfolio Review: $33,592 is up 84.6% overall in month 26 and we’re up $769 (2.3%) since last Tuesday’s review so it’s very nice when we add $700+ in a week, isn’t it? We’re not going to review it again so soon but do read last week’s review if you want to learn some good trading lessons (as well as our AI analysis in the Member Chat Room).   

At $33,592, we are on track to hit $1M in 10 years so, even if you missed the first 84.6% of our gains – you can start right now and catch the next $966,408 (2,870%) – and that’s pretty good too!  

Money Talk Portfolio Review: Since we only touch the MTP when we’re live on the show (Quarterly), back in August we decided to close out the prior portfolio, which was up 381.3% at the time ($481,334) because we weren’t going to touch it again until November – and it was FOOLISH to risk that kind of money into the unknowns of Earnings Season and the Elections (sound familiar?).  

Nonetheless, our new positions have driven the portfolio 10% ($10,050) higher – even though we are only using $3,980 of our CASH!!! – Keeping the vast majority on the sidelines so we’ll be ready to take advantage of the post-election, post earnings clean up (not to mention our 2025 Trade of the Year).  

Since we can only touch it quarterly, the MTP is full of what we feel are “bullet-proof” positions – ones we feel are likely to ride out any kind of market storm – usually because they are so undervalued, people are bound to notice them like lifelines in a storm…

Short-Term Portfolio (STP) Review:  These are our hedges! We also have long plays that make money when the hedges are losing money so we can afford to buy more hedges and, so far, we’ve been lucky enough to gain 120.9% ($241,710) in the past 17 months as we’ve taken good advantage of several dips.

This has been a very rough month for the STP, as we’ve taken a $107,623 (19.5%) hit as the market popped up to new highs. Of course we made a lot more than that in the LTP but we hate to lose anywhere, right? Still our main purpose is to hedge so let’s see what we need to do to lock in those gains in the LTP:  

• • Short Puts – The DIS, GNRC puts will go worthless soon, not worried about EXPE, GOLD, HUM (new), LEVI, MMM, NKE, PHM, RTX, TGT, TOL, TROX or YETI (most are way out of the money) so really it’s just MRK, which is trading at 11x so MORE PLEASE and we’ll double down on the short MRK Dec 2025 $125 puts and put another $9,575 in our pockets.  

• • BBY – Well, the Jan puts will go worthless and the short Jan calls look OK so the issue is those 10 short 2026 $75 calls at $26,700 and let’s roll those to 20 short Jan $97.50 calls at $6.10 ($12,200) for net $14,500 and we’ll see how earnings go (end of November) before making any other moves.  

• • F – Getting back on track.
  • IMAX – Survived some real box office flops this Summer/Fall and the Winter/Spring (Venom, Gladiator II, Wicked, Kraven (Spider Man)) looks hopeful  and we’re already over our $20 target at net $14,750 on the $25,000 spread so over 40% left to gain by March?  Not bad…
  • SKX – On track t net $10,760 out of a potential $30,000. That’s shoe business!  

• • SQQQ – The key to checking your hedges is MATH!!! SQQQ is a 3x inverse spread on the Nasdaq and the indexes are halted if they drop 10% in a day so we always make sure we have a 20% hedge – just in case. So, at $7, we multiply SQQQ by 1.6 and we get $11.20 and that is where we’d be on a 20% drop.
  • That would make our 900 $5 calls worth $6.20 ($558,000) and currently the spread is at net $90,900 so we have net $467,100 worth of downside protection. See how easy that is?!? The short Jan $11s only have $7,950 left to give us over 3 months so $2,700/month is worth the risk of buying them back – NOT because we think they will hurt us but for the OPPORTUNITY to sell other short calls IF we do get a 5-10% dip during earnings.  For the next 30 days – it can only cost us about $3,000 so that’s our risk but the reward could be selling 300 somethings for a much better price.  

If SQQQ goes any lower they are likely to announce a 1:5 reverse split – that will be very annoying!  

• • TZA – Same deal: $13.22 x 1.6 is $21.15 so that’s our expectation if there’s a sell-off. We have 600 $15s that would be $6.15 ($369,000) and 3000 $10s that would be $11.15 ($334,500) so $703,500 and the net of the spread is $134,225 so net $569,275 of downside protection.  
  • The 200 short Jan $22s will go worthless and there’s no point in buying back the 2026 $45 calls as they are miles out of the money and the short $30s are also very far away. The best move for the money we can make is to roll our 600 2026 $15 calls at $3.27 to 600  more 2026 $10 calls at $4.50 for net $1.23 ($73,800) and that buys us $300,000 of additional protection and puts us in good position to sell more short calls (so we’ll get the money back).  Let’s do that!  

So now we’ve added net $226,200 more protection on the roll + $569,275 + $467,100 from the SQQQs is a total of $1,262,575 worth of protection for our long portfolios against a 20% drop in the markets.  That seems like a good amount and now we can move on to see how good we feel about our long portfolio positions:  

IN PROGRESS