Edit 1: More ARKQ buying today (~50k shares). Thank you everyone for the positive feedback and discussion!
Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) or TL;DR for the non-military types:
LMT is a good target if you want to literally go to the moon, and my PT is $690.26 in two years (more than 2x from current levels). Justification and some possible trade ideas are listed below, just CTRL-F “Trade Ideas”. I hope you guys enjoy this work and would appreciate any discussion or feedback. I hope to catch you in the comments.
Team,
We interrupt today’s regularly scheduled short squeeze coverage to discuss a traditionally boring stock, LMT (Lockheed Martin), with significant upside potential. To be clear, this is NOT a short squeeze target like many reddit posts are keying on. I hope that this piece sparks discussion, but if you are just looking for short squeeze content, all I have to say is BUY, HOLD, and GODSPEED.
The source of inspiration for me writing this piece is threefold; first, retail investors are winning, and I believe that we will continue to win if we continue to identify opportunities in the market. In my view, the stock market has always been a place for the public to shine a light on areas of innovation that real Americans are excited about and proud to be a part of. Online communities have stolen the loudspeaker from hedge fund managers and returned it to decentralized online democracies that quickly and proudly shift their weight behind ideas they believe in. In GME’s case, it was a blatant smear campaign to destroy a struggling business. I think that we should continue this campaign by identifying opportunities in the market and running with them. It may sound overly idealistic, but if reddit can take on the hedge funds, I non-ironically believe that we can quite literally take good companies researching space technology to the moon. I think LMT may be one of several stocks to help get us there.
Second, a video where the Secretary of State of Massachusetts argues that internet boards are full of a bunch of unsophisticated, thoughtless traders really ticked me off. This piece is designed to show that ‘the little guy’ is ready to get into the weeds, understand business plans, and outpace analysts that think companies like Tesla are overvalued by comparing them to Toyota. That is a big reason that I settled on an old, large, slow growth company to do a deep-dive on, and try my best to show some of the abysmal predictive analysis major ‘research firms’ do on even some of the most heavily covered stocks. LMT is making moves, and the suits on wall street are 10 steps behind. At the time of writing this piece, Analyst Estimates range from 330-460 (what an insane range).
Third, and most importantly, I am in the US military, and I think that it is fun to go deep into the financials of the defense sector. I think that it helps me understand the long-term growth plans of the DoD, and I think that I attack these deep-dives with a perspective that a lot of these finance-from-day-one cats do not understand. Even if no one ever looks at this work, I think that taking the time to write pieces like this makes me a better Soldier, and I will continue to do it in my spare time when I am feeling inspired. I wrote a piece on Raytheon Technologies (Ticker: RTX) 6 months ago, and I think it was well-received. I was most convicted about RTX in the defense sector, but I have since shifted to believing LMT is the leader in the defense space. I am long both, though. If this inspires anyone else to do similar research on other companies, or sparks discussion in the community, that is just a bonus. Special shout-out to the folks that read more than just the TL;DR, but if you do just read the TL;DR, I love you too!
Now let us get into it:
Leadership
I generally like to invest in companies that are led by people that seem to have integrity. Jim Taiclet took the reins at LMT in June of last year. While on active duty, he served as a C-141B Starlifter pilot (a retired LMT Aircraft). After getting out he went to work for the American Tower Corporation (Ticker: AMT). His first day at American Tower was September 10, 2001. The following day, AMT lost 13 employees in the World Trade Center attack. He stayed with the company, despite it being decimated by market uncertainty in the wake of 9/11. He was appointed CEO of the very same company in 2004. Over a 16 year tenure as CEO of AMT the company market cap 20x’d. He left his position as CEO of AMT in March of last year, and the stock stagnated since his departure, currently trading at roughly the same market cap as to when he left.
Jim Taiclet was also appointed to be the chairman of the board this week, replacing the previous CEO. Why is it relevant that the CEO came from a massive telecommunications company?
Rightfully, Taiclet’s focus for LMT is bringing military technology into the modern era. He wants LMT to be a first mover in the military 5G space, military application of AI space, the… space space, and the hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) space. These areas are revolutionary for the boomer defense sector. We will discuss this in more detail later when we cover the company’s P/E multiple and why it is absolute nonsense.
It is not a surprise to me that they brought Taiclet on during the pandemic. He led AMT through adversity before, and LMT’s positioning during the pandemic is tremendous relative to the rest of the sector, thanks in large part to some strong strategic moves and good investments by current and past leadership. I think that Taiclet is the right CEO for the job.
In addition to the new CEO, the new Secretary of Defense, Secretary Lloyd Austin, has strong ties to the defense sector. He was formerly a board member for RTX. He is absolutely above reproach, and a true leader of character, but I bring this up not to suggest that he will inappropriately serve in the best interest of defense contractors, but to suggest that he speaks the language of these companies effectively. I do not anticipate that the current administration poses as significant of a risk to the defense sector as many analysts seem to believe. This will be expanded in the headwinds section below.
SPACE
Cathie Wood and the ARK Invest team brought a lot of attention to the space sector when the ARKX, The ARK Space Exploration ETF, Form N-1A was officially filed through the SEC. More recently, ARK Invest published their Big Ideas 2021 Annual Report and dedicated an entire 7-page chapter to Orbital Aerospace, a new disruptive innovation platform that the ARK Team is investigating. This may have helped energize wall street to re-look their portfolios and their investments in space technology, but it was certainly not the first catalyst that pushed the defense industry in the direction of winning the new space race.
In June 2018, then President Trump announced at the annual National Space Council that “it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space. So important. Therefore, I am hereby directing the Department of Defense (DoD) and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the Armed Forces". Historically, Department of Defense space assets were under the control of the Air Force. By creating a separate branch of service for the United States Space Force (USSF), the DoD would allocate a Chairman of Space Operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and clearly define the budget for space operations dedicated directly to the USSF. At present, this budget is funneled from the USAF’s budget. The process was formalized in December of 2019, and the DoD has appropriated ~$15B to the USSF in their first full year of existence according to the FY21 budget.
Among the 77 spacecraft that are controlled by the USSF, 29 of them are Lockheed Martin GPS satellites, 6 of them are Lockheed Martin Space-Based Infrared Systems (SBIRS), and LMT had a hand in creating and/or manufacturing for several of the other USSF efforts. The Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared Missile Warning Satellites (also known as Next-Gen OPIR) were contracted out to both Northrup Grumman (Ticker: NOC) and LMT. LMT’s contract is currently set at $4.9B, NOC’s contract is set at $2.37B.
Tangentially related to the discussion of space is the discussion of hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs). HGVs have exoatmospheric and atmospheric implications, but I think that their technology is extremely important to driving margins down for both space exploration and terrestrial point-to-point travel. LMT is leading the charge for military HGV research. They hold contracts with the Navy, Air Force, and Army to develop HGVs and hypersonic precision fires. The priority for HGV technology accelerated significantly when Russia launched their Avangard HGV in December of 2019. Improving the technology for HGVs is a critical next-step in maintaining US hegemony, but also maintaining leadership in both terrestrial and exoatmospheric travel.
LARGE SCALE COMBAT OPERATIONS (LSCO)
The DoD transitioning to Large-Scale Combat Operations (LSCO) as the military’s strategic focus. This is a move away from an emphasis on Counter-Insurgency operations. LSCO requires effective multi-domain operations (MDO), which means effective and integrated strategies regarding land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. To have effective MDO, the DoD is seeking systems that both expand capabilities against peer threats and increase the ability to track enemy units and communicate internally. This requires a modernizing military strategy that relies heavily on air, missile, and sensor modernization. Put simply, the DoD has decided to start preparing for peer or near-peer adversaries (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) rather than insurgencies. For this reason, I believe that increased Chinese and Russian tensions are, unfortunate as it may be, a boon to the defense industry. This is particularly true in the missiles/fires and space industry, as peer-to-peer conflicts are won by leveraging technological advantages.
There are too many projects to cover in detail, but some important military technologies that LMT is focusing on to support LSCO include directed energy weapons (lasers) to address enemy drone technology, machine learning / artificial intelligence (most applications fall under LMT’s classified budget, but it is easy to imagine the applications of AI in a military context), and 5G to increase battlefield connectivity. These projects are all nested within the DoD’s LSCO strategy, and position LMT as the leader in emergent military tech. NOC is the other major contractor making a heavy push in the modernization direction, but winners win, and I think a better CEO, balance sheet, and larger market cap make LMT the clear winner for aiding the DoD in a transition toward LSCO.
SECTOR COMPARISON (BACKLOG)
The discussion of LSCO transitions well into the discussion of defense contractor backlogs. Massive defense contracts are not filled overnight, so examining order backlogs is a relatively reliable way to gauge the interest of the DoD in a defense contractor’s existing or emerging products. For my sector comparison, I am using the top 6 holdings of the iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense ETF (Ticker: ITA). I hate this ETF, and ETFs like it (DFEN) because of their massively outsized exposure to aerospace, and undersized allocation to companies like LMT. LMT is only 18% smaller than Boeing (Ticker: BA) but is only 30.4% of the exposure of BA (18.46% of the fund is BA, only 5.62% of the fund is LMT). Funds of this category are just BA / RTX hacks. I suggest building your own pie on a site like M1 Finance (although they are implicated in the trade restriction BS… please be advised of that… hoping other brokerages that are above board will offer similar UIs like the pie design… just wanted to be clear there) if you are interested in the defense sector.
The top 6 holdings of ITA are:
Boeing Company (Ticker: BA, MKT CAP $110B) at 18.46%
Raytheon Technologies (Ticker: RTX, MKT CAP $101B) at 17.84%
Lockheed Martin (Ticker: LMT, MKT CAP $90B) at 5.62%
General Dynamics Corporation (Ticker: GD, MKT CAP $42B) 4.78%
Teledyne Technologies Incorporated (Ticker: TDY, MKT CAP $13B) at 4.74%
Northrop Grumman Corporation (Ticker: NOC, MKT CAP $48B) at 4.64%
As a brief aside, please look at the breakdowns of ETFs before buying them. The fact that ITA has more exposure to TDY than NOC and L3Harris is wild. Make sector ETFs balanced how you want them to be balanced and it will be more engaging, and you will likely outperform. I digress.
Backlogs for defense companies can easily be pulled from their quarterly reports. Here are the current backlogs in the same order as before, followed by a percentage of their backlog to their current market cap. All numbers are pulled from January earning reports unless otherwise noted with an * because they are still pending.
Boeing Company backlog (Commercial: $282B, Defense: $61B, Foreign Military Sales (FMS, categorized by BA as ‘Global’): 21B, Total Backlog 364B): BA’s backlog to market cap is a ratio of 3.32, which is strong, but most of that backlog comes from the commercial, not the defense side. Airlines have been getting decimated, I am personally not interested in having much of my backlog exposed to commercial pressures when trying to invest in a defense play. Without commercial exposure, their defense only backlog ratio is .748. This is extremely low. I understand that this does not do BA justice, but I am keying in on defense exposure, and I am left thoroughly unsatisfied by that ratio. Also, we have seen several canceled contracts already on the commercial side.
Raytheon Technologies backlog (Defense backlog for all 4 subdivisions: 67.3B): Raytheon only published a defense backlog in this quarter’s report. That is further evidence to me that the commercial aerospace side of the house is getting hammered. They have a relatively week backlog to market cap as well, putting them at a ratio of .664, worse off than the BA defense backlog.
Lockheed Martin backlog (Total Backlog: $147B): This backlog blows our first two defense backlogs out of the water with a current market cap to backlog ratio of 1.63.
General Dynamics Corporation backlog (Total Backlog: $89.5B, $11.6B is primarily business jets, but it is difficult to determine how much of their aerospace business is commercial): Solid 2.13 ratio, still great 1.85 if you do not consider their aerospace business. The curveball here for me is that GD published a consolidated operating profit of $4.1B including commercial aerospace, whereas LMT published a consolidated operating profit of $9.1B. This makes the LMT ratio of profit/market cap slightly in favor of LMT without accounting for the GD commercial aerospace exposure. This research surprised me; I may like GD more than I originally assumed I would. Still prefer LMT.
Teledyne Technologies Incorporated backlog (Found in the earnings transcript, $1.7B): This stock is not quite in the same league as the other major contractors. This is an odd curveball that a lot of the defense ETFs seem to have too much exposure to. They have a weak backlog, but they are a smaller growing company. I am not interested in this at all. It has a backlog ratio of .129.
Northrop Grumman Corporation backlog ($81B): Strong numbers here. I see NOC and LMT as the two front-runners in the defense sector. I like LMT more because I like their exposure to AI, 5G, and HGVs more than NOC, but I think this is a great alternative to LMT if you like the defense sector. Has a ratio of 1.69, slightly edging out LMT on this metric. LMT edges out NOC on margins by ~.9%, though, which has significant implications when considering the depth of the LMT backlog.
The winners here are LMT, GD, and NOC. BA is attractive if you think anyone will have enough money to buy new planes. BA and RTX are both getting hammered by commercial aerospace exposure right now and are much more positioned as recovery plays. That said, LMT and NOC both make money now, and will regardless of the impact of the pandemic. LMT is growing at a slightly faster rate than NOC. Both are profit machines, but I like LMT’s product portfolio and leadership a lot more.
FREE CASH FLOW
Despite the pandemic, LMT had the free cash flow to be able to pay a $2.60 per share dividend. This maintains their ~3% yearly dividend rate. They had a free cash flow of $6.4B. They spent $3.9 of that in share repurchases and dividend payouts. That leaves 40% of that cash to continue to strengthen one of the most stalwart balance sheets outside of big tech on the street. Having this free cash flow allowed them to purchase Aerojet Rocketdyne for $4.4B in December. They seem flexible and willing to expand and take advantage of their relative position during the pandemic. This is a stock that has little downside risk and significant upside potential. It is always reassuring to me to know that at the end of the day, a company is using its profit to continue to grow.
HEADWINDS
New Administration – This is more of an unknown than a headwind. The Obama Administration was not light on military spending, and the newly appointed SecDef is unlikely to shy away from modernizing the force. Military defense budgets may get lost in the political shuffle, but nothing right now suggests that defense budgets are on the chopping block.
Macroeconomic pressure – The markets are tumultuous in the wake of GME. Hedgies are shaking in their boots, and scared money weighed on markets the past week. If scared money continues to exert pressure on the broader equity markets, all boomer stocks are likely weighed down by slumping markets.
Non-meme Status – The stocks that are impervious to macroeconomic pressures in the above paragraph are the stonks that we, the people, have decided to support. From GME to IPOE, there is a slew of stonks that are watching and laughing from the green zone as the broader markets slip deeper into the red zone. Unless sentiment about LMT changes, I see no evidence that LMT will remain unaffected by a broader economic downturn (despite showing growth YoY during a pandemic).
TAILWINDS
Aerojet Rocketdyne to the Moon – Cathie Wood opened up a $39mil position in LMT a few weeks ago, and this was near the announcement of ARKX. The big ideas 2021 article focuses heavily on satellite technology, deep learning, and HGVs. I think that the AR acquisition suggests that vertical integration is a priority for LMT. They even fielded a question in their earnings call about whether they were concerned about being perceived as a monopoly. Their answer was spot on—the USFG and DoD have a vested interest in the success of defense companies. Why would they discourage a defense contractor from vertical integration to optimize margins?
International Tensions – SolarWinds has escalated US-Russia tensions. President Biden wants to look tough on China. LSCO is a DoD-wide priority.
5G.Mil – We still do not have a lot of fidelity on what this looks like, but the military would benefit in a lot of ways if we had world-wide access to the rapid transfer of encrypted data. Many units still rely on Vietnam-era technology signal technology with abysmal data rates. There are a lot of implications if the code can be cracked to win a DoD 5G contract.
TRADE IDEAS
Price Target: LMT is currently at a P/E of ~14. Verizon has roughly the same. LMT’s 5-year P/E ratio average is ~17. NOC is currently at a P/E of ~20. TSLA has a P/E Ratio of 1339 (disappointingly not 1337). P/E is a useless metric because no one seems to care about it. My point is that LMT makes a lot of money, and other companies that are valued at much higher multiples do not make any money at all. LMT’s P/E ratio is that of a boomer stock that has no growth potential. LMT’s P/E is exactly in line with the Aerospace and Defense Industry P/E ratio standard. LMT’s new CEO is pushing the industry in a new direction. I will arbitrarily choose a P/E ratio of 30, because it is half of the software industry average, and it is a nice round number. Plus, stock values are speculative and nonsense anyway.
Share price today: $321.82
Share price based on LMT average 5-year P/E: $384.08 (I see this as a short term PT, reversion to the mean)
Share price with a P/E of 30: $690.26
Buy and Hold: Simple. Doesn’t take much thought. Come back in a year or two and be happy with your tendies (and a few dividends to boot).
LEAPS Call Debit Spread (Based on last trade prices): Buy $375 C 20 JAN 23 for $26.5, Sell $450 C 20 JAN 23 for $12. Total Cost $14.5 for a spread width of $75. Max gain 517% per spread. Higher risk strategy.
LEAPS: Buy $500 C 20 JAN 23 for $7.20. Very high-risk strat. If the price target is hit within two years, these would be in the money $183 per contract for a gain of 2500%. This is the casino strat.
SOURCES
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2020/james-taiclet-from-military-pilot-to-successful-ceo.html
https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/in-response-to-senator-warrens-questions-secretary-of-defense-nominee-general-lloyd-austin-commits-to-recusing-himself-from-raytheon-decisions-for-four-years
https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2019-08-30-Lockheed-Martins-Expertise-in-Hypersonic-Flight-Wins-New-Army-Work
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/hypersonics.html
https://research.ark-invest.com/hubfs/1_Download_Files_ARK-Invest/White_Papers/ARK%E2%80%93Invest_BigIdeas_2021.pdf?hsCtaTracking=4e1a031b-7ed7-4fb2-929c-072267eda5fc%7Cee55057a-bc7b-441e-8b96-452ec1efe34c
https://www.deseret.com/2018/6/19/20647309/twitter-reacts-to-trump-s-call-for-a-space-force
https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2021/fy2021_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf
https://www.airforcemag.com/lockheed-receives-up-to-4-9-billion-for-next-gen-opir-satellites/
https://spacenews.com/northrop-grumman-gets-2-3-billion-space-force-contract-to-develop-missile-warning-satellites/
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/directed-energy/laser-weapon-systems.html
https://emerj.com/ai-sector-overviews/lockheed-martins-ai-applications-for-the-military/
https://www.defenseone.com/business/2020/07/new-ceo-wants-lockheed-become-5g-playe167072/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/defense-firms-expect-higher-spending-11548783988
https://www.etf.com/ITA#efficiency
https://s2.q4cdn.com/661678649/files/doc_financials/2020/q4/4Q20-Presentation.pdf
https://investors.rtx.com/static-files/dfd94ff7-4cca-4540-bc4b-4e3ba92fc646
https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/static-files/64e5aa03-9023-423a-8908-2aae8c7015ac
https://s22.q4cdn.com/891946778/files/doc_financials/2020/q4/GD_4Q20_Earnings_Highlights-Outlook-Final.pdf
https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/01/27/teledyne-technologies-inc-tdy-q4-2020-earnings-cal/
https://investor.northropgrumman.com/static-files/6e6e117f-f656-4c68-ba7f-3dc53c2dd13a

Other than the fact that ARK owns primarily the worst performing stock asset class in history (unprofitable smaller cap growth stocks with high reinvestment), the big problem is that the ONLY reason that people are buying it is because it went up in price. That's it. Every other reason, like the ones I made fun if in the expanding boglebrain meme, are just rationalizations of one simple fact: The companies in the fund used to be worth not very much, now they are worth like, a whole lot. Look, the fund flows track the performance precisely! Almost all of the flows into this thing came after it massively outperformed! https://www.morningstar.com/etfs/arcx/arkk/performance . (All the articles written about Peter Lynch will be written once more. "Despite multiple years of incredible performance, the average ARK ETF holder lost money/made less money than the market.")
And so you, as an investor hoping to buy a share of the future profitability of a company, have become drastically more attracted to these stocks...because they are 900% more expensive than they were 4 years ago. THAT is the stuff you think is underpriced?!
"A 65 year old lady discovered the secret to incredible riches! Double your money every month by following this one simple trick! Invest 10% of your savings now!" <--ARK fans clicked this ad, and are now spam sharing it with their entire contact list.
ARK funds are the perfect embodiment of the lottery ticket effect. People are buying into these funds for THE EXACT SAME REASON as GME. "Holy shit I could buy this and it could go up 100% in a month!" When people are buying something for lottery ticket reasons, FUCKING RUN! Run for your god damn life! We know what happens next: https://www.etf.com/sections/index-investor-corneswedroe-lotto-stocks-losing-game
Now one final thing, just for posterity so I can come back to this later: ARK is a 10% or larger shareholder of over half of the stocks in ARK funds. Re-read that sentence. When you buy ARK ETFs, you are not buying companies, really. You are buying ARK HYPE ITSELF, manifested in stocks that they just happen to hold a lot of. Notice how every ARK fund went up by a comparably huge amount, all with near perfect correlation to each other. Is it not strange to you that a genomic medicine ETF had nearly identical price movement to a technology ETF made up of primarily Tesla and Roku and Zillow, etc? And the ARK financial services technology ETF had the -exact- same meteoric rise, as the ARK Autonomous Robotics ETF? They correlate so closely that looking at the graphs, it appears that they are -tracking the same index-. AND THEY ARE. They are all tracking the FI-IBWTLST Index....Fuck It, I'm Buying Whatever That Lady Says To.
The liquidity problems and price pressure that can be placed on ARK, given this fact of being primary owners of most of the funds that they hold, is going to be one hell of a crunch when the time comes. There will be such a boatload to be made shorting it as soon as sentiment shifts and FOMOing fund managers move on to the next thing, because there really is no floor here, just the ARK brand itself! I don't short or do any of that kind of shit but there are plenty of hedge funds and institutions who are licking their chops. It's time to walk out of the casino while you still have the shirt on your back.
PS: Feel free to expand on anything I've said here or dogpile on ARK yourselves for the good of the confused Boglehead-adjacent.

Hey everyone, after the meme stock fiasco I wanted to create a post to help out newer investors that want to get into some stock "gambling". I will preface this by saying I am an investor in all of these companies, percentage allocation in my portfolio is going to be listed next to each stock.
My biggest point I hope you take away is these stocks are a MINIMUM 6 month hold if you want to see any real return. I will be holding these for at least 52 weeks, most likely longer. The market is not a casino. You can gain generational wealth but ONLY through making the right picks and holding them for a long time.
Do not place any cash you know you will potentially need access to. These companies are picks I believe to have a solid product/idea/vision and are worth a bet with my hard-earned money. I'm not an expert but I have been in the market for five years and have learned a little bit along the way. Any questions/advice/comments will be interacted with in the comments as I want to learn from this subreddit. Here are the picks...
SENSONICS HOLDINGS - $SENS (4.3% of portfolio)

Some DD in this thread from two weeks ago. Diabetics is a huge sector of the market and SENS has the superior product to existing Dexcom and Abbott. Their product is improving and gaining some traction from healthcare providers.

Sports Betting/iGaming ETF - $BETZ (1.2% of portfolio)

Gambling on gambling stocks :) Sports betting's outlook is looking promising as the prohibition cuts back. Major holdings are Draftkings and Penn National (Huge casino chain with sportsbook operations).

XPENG Inc - $XPEV (2% of portfolio)

China is pumping out EV's and Chinese consumers are purchasing at record levels. XPENG differentiates with smart technology and robotic designs, looking to capture the ever growing market of wealthy Chinese buyers. Great vehicle delivery numbers means I think they are just getting started.

Compass Pathways - $CMPS (4% of portfolio)

First psilocybin therapy to reach the market. Only company in the US with FDA approved trials on psilocybin to treat depression. Biggest company in the space and furthest lead in the US (biggest and most restrictive market). If you want to bet on the psychedelic space as a whole, this is the first company that will be relevant in the US (if approved). I'm a fan of some other stocks in the sector but they aren't allowed in this sub.

Hims and Hers ($HIMS) - (4% of portfolio)

Online telehealth for previously unrepresented services (Erectile dysfunction, hair loss, skincare). They sell their own pills and contract their own medical officials. Everything is done in house, leading to great profits. Concerns about other companies doing the same thing are valid, but don't underestimate their value as a brand and platform.

Alright you fellow retards lets all agree to perhaps maybe hit the ground running a little different going into the next year. We've had a great year already so lets not let the Boomers win and say "seeeee the Wall Street Bets crowd ultimately got it wrong." Here is a list of random thoughts/advice/and new years resolutions for 2021. Feel free to add to it in the comments below:
1- FUCKING STOP buying weekly options that are far OTM. Like just stop. Its stupid as FUCK. Buy options that have at least 30 DTE so you have a chance for the position to set up. You can always go back and sell those OTM weeklys against your new monthly calls to some other retard and see how stupid it is. Or worst case you can roll out those options and keep making more money---THIS IS THE WAY
2-Seriously why isn't there a $WSB etf? Right there is our Ticker. Someone smart who knows these things please start up an ETF with all of our favorites so the lazy FUCKS who just want to go along for the ride can get exposure. Also its an ETF----young people love anything that is an ETF and raises the share prices so we all win. Someone make that happen and I'll buy the first 100 shares
3- Loss porn is funny. But you know what we should make a thing with 2021??? Tendie parties. I wanna instead see the insane stupid things people buy with their tendies instead of knowing they stayed in the casino where the house always wins. I'm talking tigers and boats and shit! Looking at you GME gang. This is the year where we get our wives back by giving them DDD implants! You need them for a flotation device incase your private planes crash. So its an investment!
4- Options are great, but remember that the secret is out on us now. Massive buying of options alone doesn't move share price. You know what does? BUYING STONKS!!!! Put half into stocks and other half into options.
5- I love it when shit moons🚀🚀🚀🛸🛸🛸. Like mmmmmmm gets daddy hard in the morning. But I'm going to end up jacking off while my wife fucks her boyfriend if I don't do some profit taking. Sell calls at the highs, pair back positions. I love you diamond hand fucks, but remember the people that are telling you to hold as shit drops are probably the ones who have already hedged their profits.
6- I still want Uncle Cramer to ask me to sit on his lap in 2021 and tell me what a good boy I've been. So lets spend the entire year crushing it so we can get hopefully touched by Uncle and a pat on our bottoms at the end of the year when we truly fucking take this shit over to the next level
7- Lastly: more memes please? its the only thing that makes me laugh when I see my account is down 10% intraday---I know I'm a fucking pussy for not risking it all on stupid shit. 10% is pussy shit---so yea keep em coming!
Any other resolutions? Remember its a long game---Boomers would love more than anything to say we are ultimately wrong. They don't understand we are here to fuck shit up and tear down the status quo. Lets outlive these geriatric fucks so we can run the money printer one day!
EDIT POSITIONS: 3700 shares AMD at $77; 300 GME shares at $17.23; 6 Feb 21 $20 calls long -3 Jan $22 calls -3 jan $25 calls; 400 PLTR shares at $16.27 5 Jan 22 $35 at $14.00 oooof -3 jan 15 $29 calls
Plus a bunch more you don’t care about

I'm not seeing a huge amount of knowledge on this subreddit, so I'm going to list some of the reasons why I'm hoping for some decent price increases..
If you find anything juicy that I've missed feel free to leave a top level comment or even message me and I'll add it. Perhaps we should keep updating this post and sticky it as a goto DD for SCTSCRF?

Score have the most popular sports app in Canada and second most popular in the US behind ESPN, this puts them in a somewhat unique position to integrate sports betting in to a popular sports app (though note FUBO just announced purchasing Vigotry with their intention to integrate sports betting in to their sports streaming service, they closed up 34.32% today on the news and likely caused the dips in the share prices for SCR and DKNG, even PENN's share price seemed to waiver around midday);
Score already have sports betting live in Colorado, Indiana and New Jersey;
Score recently did a share offering and raised $25,649,390 which can be used for growth and expansion of sports betting in the US - check out their careers page and click on available opportunities;
Score have a multiyear partnership with the NBA and the MLB to be an authorized sports betting operator, including access to official betting data and league marks/logos for the betting app;
Score have a strategic multi-state market access partnership with PENN, PENN have access to 11 states, further PENN have a 4.7% stake in Score with the potential for this stake to increase as additional market access fees become payable (the second link, which is from PENN, says the term of the agreement with PENN is 20 years, even DKNG only has a deal for 10 years subject to a 10 year extension);
Score have a 10 year partnership with Twin River to operate an online casino in New Jersey, extendable by 5 years at TheScore's option and a further 5 years upon mutual agreement;
In Dec 2020 Score was named the most impressive emerging company in sports betting. They are also in Canada's fastest 500 growing companies, Canada's top growing companies 2019 and a 2020 TSX venture 50 company;
Let's look at some user numbers. As expected they were down a bit during 2020 due to covid, but that is about to change across the industry with sports opening up properly and sports betting being legalised in many US states and hopefully Canada to help raise tax funds for covid expenses (never will sports betting have been more socially acceptable, almost encouraged!). They achieved 3 million active monthly users (4.3 million in q1 2019, should see this or higher again once sports start up properly - 62% of those users were in the US, 27% in Canada and the remaining 11% in other international markets). Users had an average of 70 sessions per month (75 the year prior), so 3*70 = 210 million users per month. 292 million video views for esports in just Q4 alone, year-over-year growth of 243%! Their esports tiktok account has over 1 million followers while their sports tiktok account has almost 2.5 million (up over 500k in the last quarter). Over 1.5 million youtube subscribers for their esports channel. Their twitter account has ~600k followers, almost double what DKNG have! Their social sports content across Twitter, FB, Instagram and TikTok achieved an average monthly reach of about 103 million;
Score appointed sports business leader and four-time Olympian Angela Ruggiero to its board of directors - she's a hockey player, got a medal at each of the Olympics she went to including a gold;
Score already cover women's sports, doing this without having to follow the competitors or have it requested by women shows a genuine interest in supporting women's sports. Hopefully this will extend to allowing sports betting on women's sports;
Score esports has been named exclusive English language broadcast partner for League of Legends' Demacia Championship, a marquee annual event featuring 24 of China’s top esports teams. Live event coverage will run from December 20-27 and be streamed across theScore esports’ YouTube and Twitch channels. The Demacia Championship will be theScore esports’ first-ever live event broadcast, with production originating from their esports headquarters in Toronto.
In 2019 Score partnered with Ubisoft for unique video content series;
In 2014 Score was named one of the world's greatest apps (and in 2013 was named one of the 100 best Android apps of 2013);
Score has joined the National Council on Problem Gambling as a Platinum member - this bodes well for support of Score from politicians and people normally critical of sports betting who are mostly onside at the moment through the need of raising tax money for covid related costs.

Future catalysts I'm hoping for:

There's a live webcast to report q1 f2021 financial results Jan 13 at 5:30pm EST (details here). Hopefully good news so we 🚀 rather than ☄️ short-term, but I'm still bullish long-term regardless because sports have not really started up properly yet, nor has sports betting opened up in many places yet. With a bit of luck the income from the share offering will be included in the revenue for this quarter which might help;
If we ever get uplisted to NASDAQ/NYSE and get out of the penny stocks then I would be surprised if it doesn't get pumped in numerous places including WSB;
Legalisation of sports betting across more US states and Canada. The governor of NY has now expressed interest after previously being opposed to the idea, so too has Texas for example. Score do not yet have a partnership with a NY casino, but hopefully they will get on to that, they do have access to Texas through PENN;
Partnerships with NFL and NHL would be awesome to go along with the NBA and MLB partnerships;
Successfully competing with the big players like DKNG (and now FUBO too), hopefully with juicy earnings reports in to the future (if we do, look at the performance and current prices of DKNG and PENN, I'd be extremely happy if we ever made it to CAD$20/share, if we got to DKNG's current USD price we'll be in tendie heaven);
Huge uptake in sports betting with a rally of public support to help cover the public costs associated with Covid;
Maybe esports betting could become a huge thing? TheScore seem like they're in a good position to earn a decent market share there, possibly even be the ones to introduce it and bring it to market?

tl;dr: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 (hopefully at least 10x)
If you would prefer an ETF to have exposure to the betting market check out BETZ.
position: 42.8k shares

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a comment in response to a question about ETFs. This question comes up very often; usually two or three times a week. Maybe more than that. Several people suggested that it be "pinned." I obviously cannot do that, however if a mod wants to pin this, feel free to do so. I did make a few modifications and additions to that comment and for those who haven't gone back to see the changes, I thought I'd post it again here. Hopefully, this helps people who are interested in an investing approach that is either made up of ETFs or that includes ETFs as a part of their portfolio.
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QQQ - This one uses the NASDAQ 100 as its benchmark. Obviously it's an Indexed, non-managed ETF. XTF used to rate this one as a perfect 10.0 out of 10 rating, but recently dropped it to 9.9 out of 10. It has one of the highest rates of return over the past 10 years of any ETF. It does tend to be tech-heavy, especially with the FAANG +M stocks. (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google and Microsoft). Other top holdings include TSLA, NVDA and ADBE. (The rating dropped recently when the portfolio of the NASDAQ 100 was re-balanced).
VOO/SPY - VOO and SPY are non-managed funds indexed to the S&P 500 Index. These funds are very popular on this subreddit, for good reason. They are well diversified, broad market funds investing in mostly US stocks. XTF rates these funds at 9.6 out of 10 because their return on investment over the long term is somewhat tempered by some of the blue chip stocks in the funds. But those stocks also help reduce volatility relative to some other ETFs. These are solid investments, but keep in mind that in the top 10 holdings there will be a lot of crossover between these funds and other broad market funds that hold US stocks like QQQ, VTI, VGT, VOOG and SPYG. There are differences, of course, as well, but you always want to know where those duplications exist.
IWF - This is a Russell 1000 Growth fund. It is one of my favorites that doesn't get talked about much. It does have a lot of crossover with the other funds mentioned above, but the mix is slightly different. Other funds that use the Russell 1000 Growth Index include RWGV and VONG. I would describe this fund as more aggressive than VOO/SPY, less volatile than QQQ. VONE and IWB use the Russell 1000 Index as their benchmark. SPYG and VOOG use the S&P 500 Growth Index for their benchmark and would be similar (but not identical) to IWF, VONG and RWGV.
IWM - for someone looking to diversify a little bit, this is a great fund to look into. This fund is a non-managed, indexed fund that uses the Russell 2000 index as its benchmark. The big difference between the Russell 2000 index and many of the the other indexes is that the Russell 2000 index looks at small and mid-cap companies, rather than large-cap companies. Thus, there is zero crossover between this one and the funds mentioned above. While this fund will move up and down with the market, it is often less volatile than the market overall. If you look at the charts, this fund has under-performed some of the other funds over the past few months while the market has been very volatile in an upward direction, but in a crash, this fund would probably outperform the rest of the market. It has a 9.0/10 XTF rating.
VXUS - Vanguard Total International Index Fund ETF - top holdings include BABA, Tencent, Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductors, Novartis, Toyota. This is a broad market fund investing only in companies overseas. I'm not generally bullish on foreign markets, but this one is a very solid ETF with some companies that are likely to do extremely well for the foreseeable future. XTF rates this one a perfect 10.0 out of 10.
EEM - iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF - This one is going to have a lot of crossover with VXUS. It is an Emerging Markets ETF with a lot of focus on China. It includes Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, along with companies like Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductors. This one should be a solid performer as long as our trade relations with China remain normal.
EFA - This is another international ETF, but here the focus is mainly on more established companies in Europe and Japan. This is a Large Cap ETF that includes companies like Nestle SA, Roche, Toyota, Novartis and AstraZeneca.
Sector fund ETFs:
ICLN/TAN/FAN - These funds are clean/renewable energy ETFs. ICLN is more broad while TAN focuses more specifically on solar energy and FAN specifically on wind generated energy. I think renewable energy companies are the future. There is no crossover in the top holdings of this fund with the top holdings of QQQ and most of the other broad market funds. Also, these are global, not just US based companies. QCLN and PBW are also renewable energy funds, but they also contain a lot of TSLA, NIO and W.K. H.S. in their top holdings making them "electric vehicle" funds, as well. No problem if you want to add that, but you'll find a lot of Tesla in some of the funds mentioned above.
ARK group of funds: ARKG, ARKF, ARKK ARKW, ARKQ, PRNT and IZRL. These are managed funds investing in companies that invest in disruptive companies in their respective industries. Most posters on this subreddit are bullish on these funds. They are aggressive growth ETFs, but should be considered somewhat risky and volatile.

ARKG - Genomic Revolution
ARKF - Fintech
ARKK - Disruptive Companies (broader market)
ARKW - Internet/computetechnology (Telsa is a top holding)
ARKQ - Robotics and artificial intelligence
PRNT - 3D printing technology
IZRL - disruptive companies based in Israel

XL series of funds. Similar to the ARK series, these tend to be more aggressive growth funds, however these are passively managed indexed funds with various benchmarks that usually are overloaded in the better companies within a sector:

XLV - Health Care
XLK - Technology
XLY - Consumer Discretionary
XLF - Financial
XLU - Utilities
XLE - Energy
XLB - Materials
XLC - Communications
XLG - S&P Top 50
XLI - Industrial
XLP - Consumer Staples
XLRE - Real Estate

CLOUD COMPUTING: WCLD, SKYY, CLOU, BUG and XIKT. Of these WCLD has the best 52 week performance. Top holdings in WCLD include ZM, PLAN, CRM, CRWD, ZEN, WDAY, TENB, PCTY, DDOG, BL. Many of these are likely to also appear in QQQ, however, they would be in very small percentages as the Cap on these companies is much smaller.
Aerospace and Defense: XAR, ITA, PPA
Real Estate: VNQ, FREL, SCHH, IYR, PSR, BBRE
Transportation: FTXR, XTN, IYT, RGI, JETS
Oil/Energy: IYE, FENY, VDE
Consumer Staples: FSTA, VDC, IECS
Media/Entertainment: IEME, PBS, PEJ, IYC
Robotics, AI, Innovative Technologies: THNQ, ROBO, XITK, SKYY, GDAT
Semiconductors: SOXX, QTEC, QTUM, SMH, FTXL
IT: FTEC, VGT, IWY, IGM, FDN
Cyber Security: HACK, CIBR, IHAK, BUG, FITE
Consumer Discretionary: FDIS, VCR, IEDI, JHMC, IYC
5G, Connectivity: FIVG, NXTG, WUGI
Self Driving EV: IDRV, DRIV, MOTO
Gaming/Esports: NERD, HERO, ESPO, GAMR, SOCL
Casinos/Gambling: BETZ, BJK
Online Retail: IBUY, EBIZ, ONLN, CLIX, GBUY, BUYZ
Utilities: IDU, VPU, FUTY, RYU
Health Care: FHLC, VHT, IYH
Medical Devices and Equipment: IHI, IEHS, XHE

Other Unique ETFs, non-sector based:
CHGX: US Large Cap Fossil Fuel Free ETF
VIRS: Biothreat Strategy ETF

A nice portfolio might look something like this:
20% - Broad market US fund such as QQQ, VOO or IWF
20% - VXUS - International
20% - IWM - Small/Mid-cap broad market fund
10% each in four sector funds of your choice
I'm not a financial expert or advisor and this is not financial advice, just an opinion from a random internet person. I do own shares in several, but not all of the funds listed above, including QQQ, IWF, some ARK funds, ICLN, VXUS, etc.
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Edit: In one of my previous edits, I accidentally erased a bunch of the sector funds. Please feel free to comment with your favorite sector funds and let me know if I forgot to add back some that I had before.

This is a long review about Option Alpha. I tried to post this on Investimonials but that website was glitching so here it is on Reddit. I'm not riffing here on Option Alpha but trying to provide an unbiased review to the community. Hopefully this helps someone make a better decision before they part with their hard earned money.
A lot of people are getting into options, whether its theta gang or long directional option trading. My warning to everyone is that don't necessarily fall for option trading services/rooms specially when they don't list an accurate trade log and PnL account performance.
This review below here is more applicable to the Theta gang option traders/option sellers so if you are a option buyedirectional optional trader than this review won't apply to you.
Here is the TLDR - At the very best if you want very low single digit annual returns while taking huge risks and want to take the headache of making 100s of option trades, spend tons on trading commissions and subscription fees ($100 to $300 per month), waste time making option adjustments and then create a tax headache paying short term capital gains tax rates (your highest income tax bracket) on profits and filling out IRS forms at the end of the year then this is the service for you. Also the return on your time spent understanding option alpha and then implementing its strategies is negative.
Normally I would not write reviews unless I thought that subs were getting ripped off. Let me start of by saying that I don't think Kirk (the founder of Option Alpha) is running a scam per se, but he is basically bilking gullible subscribers who are very new to options trading and have been sold the dream about option selling as the ONLY proper way to make money in options.
This service is a total waste of time for the individual investor. The last few years the returns have been flat after all these trades (basically up a few % or down a few %). This is before accounting for option commissions, and taxes (selling options ie. premiums are always taxed as short term capital gains at your highest income tax rate so you get no benefit vs holding stocks or buying options over 1 year) and subscription fees. Accounting for all this basically makes this a negative return. In fact I think it is better to buy a balanced Vanguard index fund or VTI etf and just Dollar cost Average into that every month vs using this system. Atleast with VTI you can expect to make 6% over the long term. The simplest strategy which is to buy VTI etf will beat Option Alpha over the long term with fewer headaches and invested time and energy.
Let start of with the good stuff first. The option education videos are free, extremely well made so that even total beginners can understand option selling. Kirk is a gifted teacher and explains everything in simple language. If you are a complete beginner than these videos will help. Things I learnt that are useful - adjusting losing positions and how to beta hedge. However they don't get deep into the intricacies of options that professionals worry about.
The education is totally biased towards option selling strategies. They try to sell the Option Alpha system (where you are a net seller of options) to the subscriber as basically running a an insurance business or creating your personal casino where you make 100s of trades ever year to eke out a small premium for taking on the risk. They then go on to basically sells you the system as being better than buying and holding ETFs or stocks over the long run and - how option buying doesn't work 80% of the time and how buying and holding stocks is riskier than selling option premiums. This is all good in theory. But in practice it reminds me of this quote - "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.". In reality, what they don't talk about is the fact that the success of option selling relies on harvesting variance premium in the option markets (historically around 3% or so). Unfortunately in recent years the variance premium has at times declined to negative levels. The sign for VRP can flip positive to negative for different underlyings and is not always positive every single month of the year. So making money with this system is basically entirely dependent on luck. Atleast the stock market tends to grow over the long term with earnings growth and GDP growth, but there is no guarantee that this will be the case with variance premiums which could be permanently arbitraged away by option sellers and brain dead option selling strategies such as Option Alpha. Option selling has to be done smartly or not at all.
The basic system is this:
Naively diversify by selling wide Iron butterflys/condors (this is the bread and butter trade about 80 to 90% of all trades) or credit spreads (about 10% to 20%) on these sector ETFs - SPY, TLT, XOP, XRT, EEM, OIH, FXI, XLP, XBI, GLD etc. Sell options about 30 to 45 days to expiration. I say naively because whenever markets crash everything goes down together so infact naive diversification is really di-worsification. Never have more than 5% of risk in any one ETF. They like to start out trades with a 1% to 2% risk per position and then scale in as adjustments are and will be needed. Good luck following this strategy if you have a small account as you will be taking greater risk. Then do this every single month or so without regard to broader macro conditions or IV levels or trend. Doesn't matter what EEM is doing or FXI is doing. Does Option Alpha look at price action, fundamental analysis, news flow, macroeconomics etc or anything else at the individual ETF level? No it doesn't appear they do. If and when positions move against you (which they regularly do) then waste time adjusting your positions and tracking credits to prove to yourself that you did make a tiny profit. They try to center the strikes as the underlying moves with adjustments and additional scaling in positions but honestly it doesn't work over the long term.
At the end of the year after 100s of trades (6 to 10 etfs x 4 (assume butterfly or condor) x 2 (opening and closing) x 10 (every 35 to 45 days) = assume 600 trades per year not including the adjustments and additional scale ins that will be needed), subscription fees (between $100 to $300 per month), broker commissions, pay short term capital gains and then waste additional time filling out dozens of pages of IRS forms with the 100s of option trades all to make a small single digit low annual return if lucky. The thing to understand is this, with option selling you generally risk $3 to $4 for every $1 of gains. So you can have 3 winning trades and then the 4th one will blow up profits. To counter this, they will show you how to make adjusting trades (only one side of the butterfly is underwater, so the whole position can be adjusted) or scale in so that strikes are centered around current underlying price. Even after adjusting which is not a guarantee of profits, the overall the results are just extremely lame. If you refuse to adjust positions it will be impossible to make any profit with this system. This is not to say other option selling strategies don't work (there are some that can work but they require a true edge) but its just that Option Alpha doesn't work. The free Theta gang on reddit or discord probably does a better job than OA.
As such there is nothing even remotely proprietary about Option Alpha. There is no edge. Because there is always a risk that all positions can simultaneously lose money in a crash as all assets trade downward, so Option Alpha advises that only use 40-50% of the account value for option selling and keep the rest as cash as a hedge against blowing the account up. Recently they advised having a 1% long VXX calls positions to hedge black swans/market crashes which I think is an improvement over the system of past few years.
I personally think that selling this system to gullible retail subscribers is extremely irresponsible. You can argue that option selling has a place within pension funds or other entities that have a lot of money who need yield income tax free and who have a proprietary system with an edge that can makes better risk adjusted profits but Option Alpha is basically gambling and praying for profits. If selling options is so good, how come I have not heard of a single Hedge fund that only does this with 100% of their capital? There were some crooks in Florida who blew up one fund that was selling energy options (you can look up Optionseller.com on google - website is defunct now). I'm not saying Option Alpha is pursuing similarly risky strategy since these are all defined risk trades and they do ask to hold 50% in cash. But it is conceivable that you can lose 100% of the amount you have put into selling options - that is the other 50% of the portfolio under a true black swan scenario. Maybe making adjustments etc will save the portfolio but its not really a guarantee. Btw the stock market can never goto zero. We can get another market crash and yes it could take a long time to recover but it can never goto zero (the businesses underlying these stocks have real value unlike options/derivatives). With stocks you have time to sell even with a 10% gap down overnight. Options will get blown up much faster.
This strategy is not at all the best way for the individual investor to invest. The only market where this system works is even Implied volatility is high ( so that you get extra compensation for selling time decay) and the market moves sideways. However in practice the market is either steadily marching higher and IV is low, or IV is so high (that you get a decent premium) but the market is rapidly moving in either direction so you will endlessly keep adjusting positions or keep taking losses. Options are complicated instruments and if you don't understand vol skew, statistics and probability, option greeks properly and can't backtest with good data than it is literally gambling and praying for profits. There is a real risk that naive option selling can blow up accounts. Option selling only makes sense in certain market regimes and only when done smartly. To tell retail traders that they should trade this way all the time for the rest of their life is extremely irresponsible.
Here is the thing. What I'm mad about is that Option Alpha has spent all this time very aggressively marketing this system and spent the last few years trying to develop an autotrading platform. It has been recently launched in Beta mode if you upgrade to lifetime membership for $2000-$2500. My hope is that the autotrading system will work and not blowup accounts due to software glitches like the Knight Capital software glitch fiasco in 2010.
I think they know these strategies don't work. The website claims that there have been 200k people who have signed up. I think at any given time they have 1000s of subscribers who come and go. If we assume 4000 subscribers per month at avg of $100 per month is $400k per month or $4.8 million per year. This is better than a lot of smaller hedgefund managers. For Kirk's own account, it appears that he trades a $300k portfolio, but his main source of income is selling Option Alpha subscriptions and doing real estate investing. How come his account is not millions of dollars now after almost a decade? But still around 300k? The simple reason is this doesn't work and instead he invests his income from Option Alpha subscriptions into other things/real estate investing etc.
The founder of OA has institutional experience trading and as such I would have expected him to focus on improving trading performance, creating new strategies, backtesting etc, interacting with members, rather than selling snake oil promises.
There isn't enough skin in the game. Option Alpha has forums where members can talk to each other and there are probably some legitimate strategies there (none are based on the Option Alpha) developed by members. But the OA founder has been completely AWOL last few years. Zero participation. Zero time trying to refine or improve his strategies on Option Alpha. They could have hired professional optional traders or even subscribed to institutional level stuff to help them out but no they have been focused entirely on making money. There are other free blogs and similar option newsletter services which also trade condors and butterflys which have shown much much superior results, however OA refuses to adapt their strategies or spend any time engaging with members. The focus has been on scaling the business and selling promises about the new autotrading system.
I think the founder has realized that this Option alpha is going nowhere and so has decided to pivot into autotrading. Gullible retail investors have been financing the build out of this service it seems.
Want another proof of what I'm saying? You can sign up for free membership and see the performance section. First the performance section does not tell you the performance from one year to the next. The only thing you can see is the meaningless numbers such as avg profit and loss on different option selling spreads and win rate. It is impossible to reconstruct PnL performance from these metrics. I think this is very misleading. Even Motley Fool shows their performance for their $100 per year newsletter. Almost any good newsletter and or trading/membership service shares performance/trade log for the past few years. If this is just about education then charge only for educational videos and don't have trade alerts and monthly membership/weekly elite calls etc.
Another note on some of the enhancements they up-sell on the website. The tools are almost totally useless. The backtester sucks. The scanner sucks. The forum is basically impossible to use properly.
The research reports (each priced at $400) are not worth the money.
Let me summarize the technical indicator report - use commonly used oscillators that everyone knows already at a medium term time-frame and buy at oversold condition and sell at overbought condition. I mean C'mon everyone already knows this. Does Option Alpha appear to use this research - nope!
The profit matrix report will tell you that there is no limited-loss option selling strategy that produces a CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) above a low single digit return. Not a single one. This is not surprising since the variance premium per academic research is around 3 to 4%. Shouldn't this be disclosed to regular subscribers instead of asking them to pay another $400 bucks?
Covered calls research report - sell short dated deep OTM calls. Viola! There is no actionable information in these reports. These reports are a few years old and the information is not updated. The reasonable price for such reports should have been $20-$30 not $400.
You can even find REITs or dividend paying stocks that have a higher yield than than option alpha strategies.
In fact I'm not even confident if Option Alpha has used proper back testing methodology and not made mistakes. You will learn more spending this money on a proper backtesting website that professionals use. Even Seeking Alpha and Reddit have better options strategies articles for free. A lot of academic research is available for free. Tasty Trade has similar trade ideas for free. The bottom-line is that Kirk is not a skilled trader. And has made no effort to improve or adapt to the market environment the last few years. All effort has gone into growing the business and up-selling membership with very aggressive sales tactics. He is a master salesman so be careful. Its really the case of the blind leading the blind.
Just blindly sell options every month without any edge and charge big money for it without any real view about the direction of the underlying or IV.
Just to be clear I do not have unrealistic expectations from a newsletter service/system. If I'm subscribing to an expensive service than I expect that I should have a reasonable chance to make greater than 10% on my account annually. I'm not expecting 100% nor even 20% - just a reasonable 10% to 20%.
The best thing about OA is the free educational videos and the podcast. Use that and skip the paid services. Time will tell if the new autotrading pivot will work well and I would suggest waiting until it is proven to work.

Hey everyone, I am a former Wall Street trader and quant researcher. When I was preparing for my own interviews, I have noticed the lack of accurate information and so I will be providing my own perspectives. One common pattern I see is people building their own algorithm by blindly fitting statistical methods such as moving averages onto data.
I have published this elsewhere, but have copy pasted it entirely below for you to read to keep it in the spirit of the sub rules. Edit: Removed link.

What it was like trading on Wall Street

Right out of college, I began my trading career at an electronic hedge fund on Wall Street. Several friends pitched trading to me as being a more disciplined version of wallstreetbets that actually made money. After flopping several initial interviews, I was fortunate to land a job at a top-tier firm of the likes of Jane Street, SIG, Optiver and IMC.
On my first day, I was instantly hooked.
My primary role there was to be a market maker. To explain this, imagine that you are a merchant. Suppose you wanted to purchase a commodity such as an apple. You would need to locate an apple seller and agree on a fair price. Market makers are the middle-men that cuts out this interaction by being always willing to buy or sell at a given price.
In finance lingo, this is called providing liquidity to financial exchanges. At any given moment, you should be confident to liquidate your position for cash. To give a sense of scale, tens of trillions in dollars are processed through these firms every year.
My time trading has been one of the most transformative periods of my life. It not only taught me a lot of technical knowledge, but it also moulded me to be a self-starter, independent thinker, and hard worker. I strongly recommend anyone that loves problem solving to give trading a shot. You do not need a mathematics or finance background to get in.
The trading culture is analogous to professional sports. It is a zero sum game where there is a clear defined winner and loser — you either make or lose money. This means that both your compensation and job security is highly dependent on your performance. For those that are curious, the rough distribution of a trader’s compensation based on performance is a tenth of the annual NBA salary.
There is a mystique about trading in popular media due to the abstraction of complicated quantitative models. I will shed light on some of the fundamental principles rooted in all trading strategies, and how they might apply to you.

Arbitrage

One way traders make money is through an arbitrage or a risk free trade. Suppose you could buy an apple from Sam for $1, and then sell an apple to Megan at $3. A rational person would orchestrate both legs of these trades to gain $2 risk free.
Arbitrages are not only found in financial markets. The popular e-commerce strategy of drop-shipping is a form of arbitrage. Suppose you find a tripod selling on AliExpress at $10. You could list the same tripod on Amazon for $20. If someone buys from you, then you could simply purchase the tripod off AliExpress and take home a neat $10 profit.
The same could be applied to garage sales. If you find a baseball card for $2 that has a last sold price on EBay for $100, you have the potential to make $98. Of course this is not a perfect arbitrage as you face the risk of finding a buyer, but the upside makes this worthwhile.

Positive expected value bets

Another way traders make money is similar to the way a casino stacks the odds in their favour. Imagine you flip a fair coin. If it lands on heads you win $3, and if it lands on tails you lose $1. If you flip the coin only once, you may be unlucky and lose the dollar. However in the long run, you are expected to make a positive profit of $1 per coin flip. This is referred to as a positive expected value bet. Over the span of millions of transactions, you are almost guaranteed to make a profit.
This exact principle is why you should never gamble in casino games such as roulette. These games are all negative expected value bets, which guarantees you to lose money over the long run. Of course there are exceptions to this, such as poker or card counting in black jack.
The next time you walk into a casino, make a mental note to observe the ways it is designed to keep you there for as long as possible. Note the lack of windows and the maze like configurations. Even the free drinks and the cheap accommodation are all a farce to keep you there.

Relative Pricing

Relative pricing is a great strategy to use when there are two products that have clear causal relationships. Let us consider an apple and a carton of apple juice. Suppose there have a causal relationship where the carton is always $9 more expensive than the apple. The apple and the carton is currently trading at $1 and $10 respectively.
If the price of the apple goes up to $2, the price is not immediately reflected on the carton. There will always be a time lag. It is also important to note that there is no way we can determine if the apple is trading at fair value or if its overpriced. So how do we take advantage of this situation?
If we buy the carton for $10 and sell the apple for $2, we have essentially bought the ‘spread’ for $8. The spread is fairly valued at $9 due to the causal relationship, meaning we have made $1. The reason high frequency trading firms focus so much on latency in the nanoseconds is to be the first to scoop up these relative mispricing.
This is the backbone for delta one strategies. Common pairs that are traded against each other includes ETFs and their inverse counterpart, a particular stock against an ETF that contains the stock, or synthetic option structures.

Correlations

Correlations are mutual connections between two things. When they trend in the same direction they are said to have a positive correlation, and the vice versa is true for negative correlations. A popular example of positive correlation is the number of shark attacks with the number of ice-cream sales. It is important to note that shark attacks do not cause ice-cream sales.
Often times there are no intuitive reason for certain correlations, but they still work. The legendary Renaissance Technologies sifted through petabytes of historical data to find profitable signals. For instance, good morning weather in a city tended to predict an upward movement in its stock exchange. One could theoretically buy stock on the opening and sell at noon to make a profit.
One important piece of advice is to disregard any retail trader selling a course to you, claiming that they have a system. These are all scams. At best, these are bottom of the mill signals that are hardly profitable after transaction costs. It is also unlikely that you have the system latency, trading experience or research capabilities to do this on your own. It is possible, but very difficult.

Mean reversions

Another common strategy traders rely on is mean reversion trends. In the options world the primary focus is purchasing volatility when it is cheap compared to historical values, and vice versa. Buying options is essentially synonymous with buying volatility. Of course, it is not as simple as this so don’t go punting your savings on Robinhood using this strategy.
For most people, the most applicable mean reversion trend is interest rates. These tend to fluctuate up and down depending on if the central banks want to stimulate saving or spending. As global interest rates are next to zero or negative, it may be a good idea to lock in this low rate for your mortgages. Again, consult with a financial advisor before you do anything.

I am a former Wall Street quantitative trader and researcher in NYC. I have often seen people aspiring to be quants build projects themselves, but fall into the trap of blindly fitting statistical models to the data. I have written an article to give people a better insight into strategies deployed on the Street.

Arbitrage

One way traders make money is through an arbitrage or a risk free trade. Suppose you could buy an apple from Sam for $1, and then sell an apple to Megan at $3. A rational person would orchestrate both legs of these trades to gain $2 risk free.
Arbitrages are not only found in financial markets. The popular e-commerce strategy of drop-shipping is a form of arbitrage. Suppose you find a tripod selling on AliExpress at $10. You could list the same tripod on Amazon for $20. If someone buys from you, then you could simply purchase the tripod off AliExpress and take home a neat $10 profit.
The same could be applied to garage sales. If you find a baseball card for $2 that has a last sold price on EBay for $100, you have the potential to make $98. Of course this is not a perfect arbitrage as you face the risk of finding a buyer, but the upside makes this worthwhile.

Positive expected value bets

Another way traders make money is similar to the way a casino stacks the odds in their favour. Imagine you flip a fair coin. If it lands on heads you win $3, and if it lands on tails you lose $1. If you flip the coin only once, you may be unlucky and lose the dollar. However in the long run, you are expected to make a positive profit of $1 per coin flip. This is referred to as a positive expected value bet. Over the span of millions of transactions, you are almost guaranteed to make a profit.
This exact principle is why you should never gamble in casino games such as roulette. These games are all negative expected value bets, which guarantees you to lose money over the long run. Of course there are exceptions to this, such as poker or card counting in black jack.
The next time you walk into a casino, make a mental note to observe the ways it is designed to keep you there for as long as possible. Note the lack of windows and the maze like configurations. Even the free drinks and the cheap accommodation are all a farce to keep you there.

Relative Pricing

Relative pricing is a great strategy to use when there are two products that have clear causal relationships. Let us consider an apple and a carton of apple juice. Suppose there have a causal relationship where the carton is always $9 more expensive than the apple. The apple and the carton is currently trading at $1 and $10 respectively.
If the price of the apple goes up to $2, the price is not immediately reflected on the carton. There will always be a time lag. It is also important to note that there is no way we can determine if the apple is trading at fair value or if its overpriced. So how do we take advantage of this situation?
If we buy the carton for $10 and sell the apple for $2, we have essentially bought the ‘spread’ for $8. The spread is fairly valued at $9 due to the causal relationship, meaning we have made $1. The reason high frequency trading firms focus so much on latency in the nanoseconds is to be the first to scoop up these relative mispricing.
This is the backbone for delta one strategies. Common pairs that are traded against each other includes ETFs and their inverse counterpart, a particular stock against an ETF that contains the stock, or synthetic option structures.

Correlations

Correlations are mutual connections between two things. When they trend in the same direction they are said to have a positive correlation, and the vice versa is true for negative correlations. A popular example of positive correlation is the number of shark attacks with the number of ice-cream sales. It is important to note that shark attacks do not cause ice-cream sales.
Often times there are no intuitive reason for certain correlations, but they still work. The legendary Renaissance Technologies sifted through petabytes of historical data to find profitable signals. For instance, good morning weather in a city tended to predict an upward movement in its stock exchange. One could theoretically buy stock on the opening and sell at noon to make a profit.
One important piece of advice is to disregard any retail trader selling a course to you, claiming that they have a system. These are all scams. At best, these are bottom of the mill signals that are hardly profitable after transaction costs. It is also unlikely that you have the system latency, trading experience or research capabilities to do this on your own. It is possible, but very difficult.

Mean reversions

Another common strategy traders rely on is mean reversion trends. In the options world the primary focus is purchasing volatility when it is cheap compared to historical values, and vice versa. Buying options is essentially synonymous with buying volatility. Of course, it is not as simple as this so don’t go punting your savings on Robinhood using this strategy.
For most people, the most applicable mean reversion trend is interest rates. These tend to fluctuate up and down depending on if the central banks want to stimulate saving or spending. As global interest rates are next to zero or negative, it may be a good idea to lock in this low rate for your mortgages. Again, consult with a financial advisor before you do anything.

Attention all cousins and new citizens of Gotham, please read before posting a question. Thank you!
Frequently Asked Questions #FAQ
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‣ WHAT IS THE STRIKE PRICE FORMULA?

Identify 52 week high to determine if there is room to run
Identify current price of stock or ETF
Look at performance based on length of contract you are assessing. (For example, 2 yr performance on Barchart.com)
Take performance (in dollar amount not percentage) divide it by the following: 2yr contract then divide by 1.5, 6 month contract divide by 2, 3 month contract divide by 2 (basically divide by half)
Take performance divided by 1.5 and add that to the current stock price
This number will be your high end strike price
Next take your high end strike price and multiple by .10 (10% correction)
Take your high end strike price and minus the result of the 10% correction
This number will be your low end strike price
Now you have a range between your high end strike price and lower end strike price.
Select a strike between that range or add your high end and low end strike prices together and divide by 2 to get the average.

Excel sheet for convenience not ignorance: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Aibe1lJ-w1qL20vOXqJPkKra_t4LMGWq8rFEMbbWcPM/edit
‣ WHAT TIME DOES THE SHOW COME ON?
Trade Talk Tuesdays 6pm Pacific/9pm Eastern Hot Take Thursdays 5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern YouTube.com/c/TheComeUpSeries
‣ “I WANT TO LEARN OPTIONS, WHERE SHOULD I START?”
Reddit.com/thecomeupseries Welcome to Gotham, cousin! Please visit the Reddit page, there is a stickied post with relevant time stamps for every episode that has been uploaded to YouTube. Start there and cross-reference it with this FAQ.
‣ HOW DO I PLACE AN OPTION?
It depends on the brokerage site you are using. Mark walks through how to place an option trade on E*TRADE at the 58:00 minute mark on the “Blood on the Market Streets? Buy or Run”
‣ WHY CAN’T I DO OPTIONS ON MY BROKERAGE ACCOUNT?
You’re account is probably on Level 1 which is restricted to buying/selling shares. Simple options trading usually starts at Level 2. Reach out to your broker and ask to gain access to options.
‣ WHATS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BUYING A CALL AND SELLING A CALL?
The Come Up Series only teaches buying calls, selling calls has unlimited risk and is much more complicated. Buying a call is when you are paying a premium (contract price) in exchange for the ‘right’ to buy shares at a fixed price (strike price) on a certain date. The strategy in buying calls is to buy at a low premium and sell at a higher premium before the contracts expire. When exiting your position after buying a call, you are selling your contracts but you are not ‘selling a call’. I would refer to Google if you really want to learn what selling a call is.
‣ WHAT HAPPENS IF MY OPTION EXPIRES?
Depends on the brokerage company. Some companies will attempt to sell your position at any available bidding price an hour prior to the market closing on the date of your expiration (even if it causes you to lose money), some will let it expire worthless (meaning you lose the entire premium that you paid for the position) and if you have enough capital, some brokerages will exercise the contract (congratulations you now own how ever many contracts you bought x 100 shares of the stock)
‣ WHATS WRONG WITH ROBINHOOD?
Robinhood is a very simplistic platform. For options trading specifically, simplicity is not your friend. You want to be able to perform research and utilize as many tools as possible when doing options. Also Robinhood is known for delays in their bid/asking prices among other things. If you are comfortable with them feel free to continue to use them. Mark uses ETRADE. This is not to bash Robinhood or an endorsement for ETRADE, just facts.
‣ WHATS QUADRUPLE WITCHING?
Quadruple witching is a day in which 4 different areas of the market (stock options, stock futures, index futures, index options) contracts expire on the same day, resulting in increased volatility. Occurs on the third Friday of March, June, September and December.
‣ WHEN DO NEW CONTRACTS COME OUT?
The Monday before Quadruple Witching.
‣ WHAT ARE BOLLINGER BANDS AND HOW DO YOU USE THEM?
Bollinger bands are an indicator that show the standard deviation level directly above and below the simple moving average of a stock price. As Mark puts it, if a stock price travels outside of the bands, it will snap back to the band. You can use these on barchart.com by searching for the stock - clicking on on interactive chart - click “+Study” directly above the chart, then click “Bollinger Bands”. Mark recommends using them on a 6 month up to 2 year chart and a 20 day setting. *Refer to 46:40 minute mark on “Aug 4th Walk Away Money”
‣ WHAT IS THE VIX?
Volatility Index (.VIX) - measures the predictability of the market. Typically when the VIX is up, a vast majority of the market is down and trading unpredictably versus when the VIX is down, the market is more predictable.
‣ WHAT IS RSI?
Relative Strength Index - a way to measure the rate of change and speed in a stock, ranges from 0 - 100%. Anything 30% or less is oversold. Anything 75% or higher is overbought. To look at RSI visit Barchart.com, search stock symbol, click “Traders Cheat Sheet” on the left *Refer to 57:30 minute mark “Aug 4th Walk Away Money”
‣ WHAT’S HEDGING?
Hedging is a technique used to curtail losses on long-term investments. For example, placing a short-term put that coincides with a long-term call option.
‣ HOW DO I PLACE A PUT TO PROTECT MY LONG-TERM CALL?
When noticing a downward trend in a stock that you have a long term call on, you can place a put to protect your long-term call. In order to do so, you must first find the first level of support (most recent high point on the one month chart). You would then use that price as the price to buy your put with an expiration date of about 3 months away. Another instance you could place a put is if you notice that your stock’s price has traveled out of the Bollinger Bands, you can set up a put at the price where the stock will have to travel back inside the bands. This is not required but if you are wanting to maximize profits, Mark recommends to do 1 put for every 5 contracts. *Refer to the 31:00 minute mark on “Aug 6th For the Win”
‣ “I’M IN THE RED ON MY OPTION THAT EXPIRES 2 YEAR FROM NOW, SHOULD I SELL TO TRY TO GET A BETTER POSITION?”
Did you use the Strike Price Formula? If so STICK TO THE SCRIPT!
‣ WHAT IS MARGIN? SHOULD I USE IT?
Margin is essentially a line of credit extended to traders who qualify. NO! You should not use somebody else’s money to trade. Why? Because there’s a term called ‘margin call’ where essentially at any time the broker chooses they can close out your positions to cover your margin balance and if you don’t have the equity to cover, congratulations you are now in debt to a brokerage company.
‣ SHOULD I DO SHORT TERM OPTIONS TO GROW MY CAPITAL?
NO!
‣ HOW DO I DO SHORT TERM OPTIONS AROUND EARNINGS TIME?
DONT!!! Just go to the casino if you like to gamble.
‣ WHERE IS MARK’S COURSE/HOW DO I PAY FOR IT?
1) Get your notebook 2) Watch the videos YouTube.com/s/TheComeUpSeries 3) Scroll thru the Reddit Reddit.com/TheComeUpSeries 4) Scroll the FB group you’re already in 5) Don’t ever ask that question again in your life
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If you have any other questions or if you see a common question that’s not listed, feel free to comment and I will continue to add to this post. If you see any posts that ask a question that is listed here just hashtag #FAQ and it will direct them here.

New Wealth Simple Socially Responsible ETF:

(WSRI) Wealthsimple North America Socially Responsible Index ETF
TSX Listing: https://web.tmxmoney.com/quote.php?qm_symbol=WSRI&locale=EN
Factsheet: https://www.solactive.com/wp-content/uploads/solactiveip/en/Factsheet_DE000SLA9865.pdf

(WSRD) Wealthsimple Developed Markets ex North America Socially Responsible Index ETF
https://web.tmxmoney.com/quote.php?qm_symbol=WSRD
Factsheet: https://www.solactive.com/wp-content/uploads/solactiveip/en/Factsheet_DE000SLA9899.pdf

Official Press Release:

We Made an Even More Socially Responsible Portfolio
Introducing Wealthsimple’s new SRI portfolio. We designed it to be the most effective, low-cost, and, yes, socially responsible ETF in Canada.
By Wealthsimple — June 16, 2020
We were pretty excited a few years ago when we introduced our Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) portfolio. There was a huge demand among our clients (and our own team) for a way to grow wealth while also growing a better world. Our SRI portfolio was a way to do just that: it had low fees, good returns, excellent diversification and invested in funds and companies that met a pre-determined threshold for social responsibility — low carbon emissions, cleantech innovation, sustainable growth in emerging markets, gender diversity. Finally: Here was a way to invest not just wisely and profitably, but with a conscience.
We’re also dedicated to two important principles: first is reassessing our investments and the rest of our business to see if there’s a better way to do it, and second, to be as transparent as possible. And, transparently, we realized there was a problem with our SRI portfolio. The thresholds the funds used to pick companies to invest in left a lot to be desired. So rather than depending on outside funds, last year we began building our own, better version. And today we’re introducing two new low-fee Wealthsimple ETFs: WSRI, which holds North American companies, and WSRD, for developed markets outside North America, such as Japan, Australia, and Europe. Both ETFs trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and they’re the basis for our redesigned SRI portfolios on Wealthsimple Invest (plus some government bonds to mitigate risk). But first, let’s go back to what went wrong.
We Didn’t Want the Best Worst Companies
The problem with our previous portfolio was simple: the standard way ETF providers decide which companies get included in a socially responsible fund is flawed. What they do is rank companies in any given industry by their social responsibility, then invest in the highest-scoring companies. The problem with this approach is that it’s based not on being, on balance, responsible. It’s based on being responsible relative to other companies in any given industry.
That way of filtering meant that some of these ETFs still invested in fossil fuels companies and tobacco companies and arms manufacturers and problematic mining companies. They simply invested in the least bad of those companies. The problem is that a company might be the “most responsible” weapons manufacturer — but it’s still a weapons manufacturer. And our clients who were being conscientious about their investments by and large didn’t want to invest in any weapons manufacturers — even if they happen to have lower carbon output than their competitors. The existing funds available in Canada just didn’t make it possible to do that (while also being diversified).
So We Made Our Own ETFs
We set out to build a fund with far more intentional and stringent filters for the companies we’d be investing in. That meant weeding out entire industries, and types of corporate behaviour.
The result? When you invest in a Wealthsimple ETF, here are what the funds won’t invest in:
Big polluters, like oil and gas-related companies. Companies involved in thermal coal mining or coal power generation. We’ve also omitted the top 25% of carbon emitters in each industry — lowering the overall carbon footprint of the funds without sacrificing diversification.
Companies in violation of the UN Global Compact (major controversies and human rights violations).
Any defence contractors or weapon manufacturers.
Companies involved in the manufacture of tobacco products, alcohol products, and casino, gaming, and adult nightclub/entertainment companies.
Companies without women on the board. Companies in these funds must have 3+ or 25%+ women on their boards.
What will we invest in, then?
To clarify a popular misconception about SRI funds, it won’t be all electric-car companies and wind power. (That’s a different category of cause-driven investing called impact investing, which you can do on Wealthsimple Trade.) No, what we look for are companies that have diversity on their boards and walk the walk when it comes to progressive policies in the realms of sustainability and corporate governance. Internationally, this means a concentration of companies in Germany and the Nordic nations, which tend to have the most regulation in those areas. In North America, it means a wide range of companies in sectors ranging from financial services to real estate to food and beverage conglomerates.
No Baddies, Plus Lower Fees and Wealthsimple-Quality Performance
The other big benefit to making our own ETFs is we could charge lower fees. SRI funds are typically a little more expensive than non-SRI funds, for good reason: someone has to do the research and analysis that goes into deciding what’s included in and excluded from the funds, and that work comes with a cost. But since we’re the ones doing that research, and we’re no longer paying an outside firm a premium for the service, you’ll pay lower fees — the fee for WSRI is 0.20% and it's 0.25% for WSRD. The overall fee you'll pay for the equity funds in a Wealthsimple Invest SRI portfolio is only about 0.23% (compared to about 0.48% before).
Like all our investing portfolios, our SRI portfolios are broadly diversified and designed for investors to keep their savings in so they can build wealth in the long term. There is no intended trade-off on returns — we believe you can still do well by doing good.
Get Started
All you need to do is sign up for a Wealthsimple Invest account and choose “make my portfolio socially responsible” when prompted during the sign-up process. Your portfolio will include the two new ETFs, as well as government bonds to mitigate the risk — the proportion between stocks and bonds depends on how much risk you decide to take on. You can also buy WSRI and WSRD on Wealthsimple Trade (and pay $0 commission fees), or anywhere else you buy ETFs.
And if you’re already a Wealthsimple Invest client with an SRI portfolio, you don’t need to do a thing. Your investments will automatically be transferred into to the new portfolio.

Source: https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/news-sri-portfolio?utm_source=exacttarget&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=SRI
-Edit-
Added factsheets for ETF's

So out of curiosity I'm wondering if other people are like me watching an insane amount of targets each day or if you try to limit yourself to a select few?
I've got 1 main list that includes every ticker that I watch for big changes during the day and then sublists for all kinds of stuff...energy/oil, entertainment (casino/cruises), financials, food/beverage, health/pharma, industrial, real estate, retail, travel (aihotel), tech and then a general for various ETFs or underlyings that just move to their own drum aka SPCE. Last time I checked I had over 300 I keep an eye on and add to it at least a few times per week when I come across something new (yesterday it was THC which I advise people to take a look at).
So how about you? 300+? 5? 20? 100?

TL;DR: Robinhood is a great way to get into investing, but the market is volatile, even the professionals lose to pure randomness, and so will you. The time-tested strategy is boring, low-cost index funds like VOO that you hold until you die. And you should concentrate on tax-advantaged accounts like your 401K and IRA before any of that.
Edit: I don't mean this to come off as outrage, or imply that Roosterteeth shouldn't be advertising Robinhood. Robinhood is amazing, I personally have had some great success with it, and was even a little excited to see Roosterteeth advertising it. I have also seen plenty of people see its simplicity, assume that's all there is to investing, and make fatal mistakes, often by buying shit options, or assuming Robinhood Gold is free money. I just want to be a quick buffer between that.
I want to start this off by saying that I am in no way a financial expert. I'm an amateur investor who considers themselves reasonably well informed when it comes to finances and investments. I submit this as an introduction to educating yourself, and will list far more quality resources to learn from at the end.
My Concern
Roosterteeth, Funhaus, and other podcasts I listen to have recently been advertising for Robinhood as a simple way to get into investing, with the implication being that investing is what smart, responsible, rich people do, and you should too. But there's some stipulations to this, and I feel Robinhood and Roosterteeth are both a little flippant about the risks involved, especially when introducing large, inexperienced audiences to the investment world. That being said, investing is important to your long-term prosperity, and Robinhood is great with 0 fees, and its simplification of investments that typically sound far more complicated than they are. But it's important to identify your tolerance to risk, and use this to know what investments you're making, and exactly how risky they are. Below I want to give a basic overview of what exactly stocks and options are, how risky they are, and some general advice surrounding them.
What are Stocks?
When a company wants to raise money quickly, but doesn't want to take out loans, they typically decide to go public. This means they split the company up into shares of stock, each of which represents a small piece of the company. These shares each cost a certain amount of money to buy called their share price. At the time of writing, Apple (AAPL) stock is at $207.48, and there are currently 4,829,926,000 shares of Apple out there. Meaning that $207.48 will buy you 1 / 4,829,926,000 of Apple. This also means that Apple as a company is currently worth 4,829,926,000 * $207.48 = $1,002,113,000,000. This price is dictated largely by how confident people are in the future of the company. If a report comes out that Apple is doing really well, the stock price will likely go up, and vice versa.
What are Options?
Options are another security (security is a largely general term used for investments you can buy) that are not stocks themselves, but are contracts regarding what you can do with stocks. They're more complicated than just buying and selling stocks, and can be far more risky. There's a lot to them, but the basic idea is that you are buying the option to buy or sell a stock at a certain price, by a certain time. There are two basic types of options, put and call options. A call option is where you believe that the stock price will go up, a put option is where you believe a stock price will go down. I'll leave Khan Academy to explain the specifics as they can do far better than I. The short and skinny of it being that options are more complicated, riskier, and you should take some serious caution before jumping into this space. Options are where I simultaneously love and hate Robinhood, as they make it very easy for people to understand them, but simultaneously make it far too easy for people who shouldn't be investing in them, to do so.
How Does Robinhood Fit Into This?
Robinhood is a brokerage, which is effectively a store through which you can buy stocks and options. There are tons of brokerages, some popular ones being Schwab, Fidelity, and TD Ameritrade. They all offer different services and products at different prices. The one point we'll focus on is commission fees. A commission fee is how much you are charged for the privilege of buying a stock or option, which is typically around $8 per trade. So if I bought 1 share of Apple for $200, it would usually cost me $208. Robinhood is unique in that it charges $0 per trade. It's also unique in that it's primarily a simple mobile app, while other brokerages are far more complicated.
Robinhood Gold
My immediate advice, do not touch this. My main criticism with Robinhood is not really explaining what this is. It is a loan that you are effectively gambling with. If you are a professional (which means you've gone to school, and gotten a job doing this stuff, not that you've made $1000 on lucky trades) this can be useful. But even the pros get absolutely wrecked by using this kind of stuff, and I absolutely urge you to not touch this. Using Robinhood Gold (otherwise known as margin) in the investing world exposes you to far more risk.
Cool, How Do I Get Rich?
Slowly. There's tons of cases of people making it big with Bitcoin, some bullshit penny stock, or a lucky options trade that makes them millions in a matter of days. These are the exception, not the rule. Smart investing is typically a slow and boring process. Warren Buffett, the greatest investor of all time, espouses the idea of long-term investments in good companies. This has made him one of the richest people in the world, making him someone you want to listen to on the topic. His advice? Don't bother with Robinhood. Use your company's 401K to its fullest extent, and buy boring, stable ETFs. ETFs are a large collection of stocks that track the general direction of the stock market. Over 10, 20, 30 years, these consistently make money. They're not sexy, and won't make you rich in a few days, but will reliably make you comfortable far in the future. These are the responsible thing to do, and will ensure you spend retirement without a lot of stress. Check out /investing's wiki which has a lot of great info on this.
But I Want to be Rich Now!
You won't. Or rather, it's statistically unlikely that you will. The odds are better than if you were buying lottery tickets, but they still aren't great. If however, you've got a gambler's penchant, and are totally fine with losing 100% of your investment in a matter of hours, you can try actively trading options. Once you are done looking through /investing's wiki and have done the responsible thing, I authorize you to do the dumb shit and expose yourself to the whims of luck. A community attempting this path is /wallstreetbets, and they openly joke about how stupid they are for attempting this. They're extremely crass, and exhibit every symptom of a gambling addiction. If you decide to go down this route, you should absolutely only use money you are willing to lose. Treat it like a casino, where you know that eventually, you will absolutely lose all of that money. You're just paying for the hope that you won't.
Further Reading
There's plenty of resources out there, here's a collection of my favorites.
Through the Internet

At your Library

Never pay for investing clubs, or those YouTube channels that have hosts with ferraris telling you they can make you rich. You're buying them the ferraris, when you could have bought a book that will be far more valuable for a fraction of the price.

US Stocks Preview Ahead of the Open

An upbeat forecast from Apple (AAPL) is likely to reignite tech stocks today as investors waiting for the Fed decision, futures are higher in pre-market trading with front-month Dow Jones minis +0.27%, S&P 500 minis +0.31% and Nasdaq 100 minis +0.68%
The Federal Reserve's FOMC will meet today and give its intertest rate decision which the market believes will be no action
Investors will be keen to hear from the Fed its outlook on the present muted inflation environment as well as its growth outlook
Most global stock markets are closed today for the May 1st Labor Day holiday
ADP Employment Change report is expected to report 180,000 jobs added,
US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin called the most recent talk with China "productive", read more on US-China talks: US warships in Taiwan Straight can only mean one thing: US - China Trade Negotiations Resume this Week
Has the hour for small-caps arrived? Don't Forget About Me! Small-Caps Have Trailed Their Big Brothers, But That May Soon Change
The VIX is little changed this morning and is currently at 13.21 after closing at 13.12 yesterday
SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) May 3, June 21 and Decemeber 20 OTM Puts and May 3 OTM Calls and iShares China Large-Cap ETF (FXI) June 21 OTM Calls are the most actively traded options contracts in US pre-market trading this morning
US 10-Year Treasury Bonds are higher with yields down -0.73 basis points to 2.4945%
The US Treasury 2s-10s Spread has narrowed 0.12 basis points to 0.23%
WTI Crude is currently up 0.65% to USD$63.91/bbl with the Brent-WTI spread little changed USD$-0.04 to USD$8.38/bbl
Gold is currently little changed -0.06% to USD$1282.74/oz

Stocks Trending in the News

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) delivered first quarter earnings and revenue in line. AMD first quarter revenue of $1.27 billion matched consensus of $1.26 billion, growing 8%. Adjusted EPS of 6 cents came a bit ahead if 5 cents expected. AMD gave second quarter revenue guidance of $1.47 billion to $1.57 billion. AMD is rated “Unattractive” in our US Large-Cap Global Top Stock Ideas and “Neutral” in our US Information Technology Global Top Stock Ideas.
Amgen (AMGN) reported earnings that beat expectations. First quarter adjusted EPS of $3.56 beat consensus of $3.47. Amgen first quarter revenue of $5.56 billion matched $5.57 billion consensus. Amgen upped full year EPS guidance to $13.25 to $14.30, up from $13.10 to $14.30; full year revenue guidance is $22 billion to $22.9 billion. Amgen is rated “Neutral” in our US Large-Cap Global Top Stock Ideas
Apple (AAPL) reported fiscal second quarter earnings that beat consensus. Apple first quarter EPS was $2.46, beating $2.36 consensus. Apple saw revenue of $58 billion in the second quarter beating consensus of $57.49 billion. Apple announced it would buy back $75 billion worth of stock. Apple gave third quarter revenue guidance of $52.5 billion to $54.5 billion, well above consensus of $52.2 billion. Apple said iPhone revenue dropped to $31.05 billion from $37.6 billion a year ago. Apple is rated “Neutral” in our US Large-Cap Global Top Stock Ideas and “Neutral” in our US Information Technology Global Top Stock Ideas.
Humana (HUM) reported first quarter earnings and revenue that beat consensus. Humana posted first quarter adjusted EPS of $4.48, ahead of $4.29 expected. Revenue in the first quarter was $16.11 billion, beating $15.76 billion consensus. Humana hiked full year EPS guidance to $17.25 to $17.50, up from $17 to $17.50; present consensus is $17.45. Humana is rated “Top Buy” in our US Large-Cap Global Top Stock Ideas
L3 (LLL) reported first quarter earnings and revenue that beat consensus. L3 first quarter revenue of $2.7 billion beat consensus of $2.52 billion. EPS in the first quarter of $2.89 beat consensus of $2.49. L3 gave full year revenue guidance of about $10.9 billion, below consensus of $11.06 billion with full year free cash flow expected to be $1.06 billion. L3 is rated “Attractive” in our US Large-Cap Global Top Stock Ideas and “Neutral” in our US Industrials Global Top Stock Ideas
Mondelez International (MDLZ) reported first quarter adjusted earnings that beat consensus. Mondelez International posted first quarter adjusted EPS of 65 cents, beating consensus of 61 cents. First quarter adjusted revenue of $7.02 billion came well above $6.55 billion consensus. Mondelez International gave adjusted EPS growth guidance of 3%-5% for 2019 with organic net revenue growth of 2%-3%. Mondelez International is rated “Neutral” in our US Large-Cap Global Top Stock Ideas and “Attractive” in our US Consumer Discretionary Global Top Stock Ideas
Tesla (TSLA) and the SEC have come to an agreement on the oversight of CEO Elon Musk’s tweet. The two sides came up with a list of financial milestones the Musk is not allowed to tweet about. The new deal has a list of specific items that Mr. Musk is not permitted to tweet about without first getting approval from Tesla lawyers. The new deal has a list more extensive than the original deal signed by the parties. Tesla is rated “Top Short” in our US Large-Cap Global Top Stock Ideas and “Neutral” in our US Consumer Discretionary Global Top Stock Ideas
Wynn Resorts (WYNN) was cleared by the state of Massachusetts to open a casino in the state in the wake of its sexual misconduct problems. Massachusetts left in the place a $35 million fine related to the misconduct. The approval contained a sharp rebuke of Wynn’s CEO’s response to the situation but did not thwart Wynn’s desire to open the casino. Wynn Resorts is rated “Unattractive” in our US Large-Cap Global Top Stock Ideas and “Neutral” in our US Consumer Discretionary Global Top Stock Ideas

International Stock Markets Recaps

European (ex-UK) and Asian markets are closed for Labor Day today

Ensign Peak Advisers filed some paperwork with the SEC. Inside you can see some of the LDS Church's holdings. This particular report shows only some of the money managed by Ensign.
https://sec.report/Document/0001454984-20-000005/
The report includes companies that the LDS Church has invested directly in. More interestingly, the report also shows some ETFs the LDS Church has invested in. ETFs are broad market instruments that are set up to mimic a certain index.
In order to mimic the index, the manager of an ETF will buy all of the companies in the index. Everything. One such ETF included in the portfolio listed is SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), which mimics the S&P500- an index which has 500 of the largest companies traded in the US in it. The index includes companies that produce tobacco (like Phillip Morris) or alcoholic beverages (like Molson Coors), and companies that own casinos (like MGM).
So that rumor that the LDS Church was invested in Coca-Cola was right. Coke is a large company included in major indexes, so it would have been included.
edited:clarity

The SEC just posted a new batch of 286 comments on the SolidX ETF, bringing the total to 1147. I am skimming through them and posted some of the best already to this sub.
The vast majority are short comments, obviously submitted in response to some mail-in campaign. The names sound very much like the invented ones of spam emails that I have been receiving for years. A telling detail is the lack of a middle initial.
They also mostly repeat the same arguments, and many are obviously written by people who don't understand what is the ETF, only that if that SEC thing approves it then the bitcoin price will go to the moon. I have just seen a dozen that start with the same phrase "I hearby[sic] state my acceptance and full support..."
Some are so sloppy that they submit with one name but sign with a different name.
Here are some honorable mentions:

Can't be any simpler than this: "Bitcoin forever!!!"
Wait, yes it can: "I support"
Capitalizing Every Word May Do It
Secured by math: "Please allow Bitcoin ETF as Bitcoin is an implementation of the perfect math and therefore based on the truth. Math has brought prosperity for mankind"
The New Age approach: [In Spanish] "Cordial salute. The new age of aquarius, which is the age of conscience and light, brings with it bread under the arm, in the second world war when the enigma code was deciphered to end the devastating war, we were at the door of the new age, and cryptography was making its first redeeming steps. Why resist what is good and favorable, when thanks to cryptography the second world war ended, and now it gives us again the hand, to an anti-corrupted technology, which wants to end a war disguised as crime, drug traffic, and political corruption, war that is carried out in silence and keeps obstaclizing the good development of mankind. Blockchain the technology of the new age of aquarius. Approved."
The cryptozoology approach to cryptocurrency trading, aka "it does not exist if I try hard enough to convince myself that it doesn't": "Price manipulation in Bitcoin Markets, to me feels the same of the Lock Ness Monster, everybody is certain it exists but nobody has evidence of it, or knows the real figures of the phenomenon. Whilst we do observe in many markets recurring behaviours that signal practices like Wash Trading and Spoofing, we are always able to reconcile impacting news and events with the sentiment of traders and make sense of price patterns of an asset such as Bitcoin, living up on both high expectations and dramatic fears."

A few negative comments:

Johnny I: "an asset as it sits on the highly volatile market where distribution of coins are unevenly formed by small number of holders across the world (1% of addresses own 80-90% mined coins) who could manipulate prices effortlessly over the fake news. Also, sky-rocketing mining cost and inevitable hike of transfer fee (soon it will be only source of revenue for miners) will cast doubt to sustainability for a public investment tool. Bitcoin ETF would only serve as investing fads."
Mark Szyszkowski, CCRCP.org: "[...] Where is the intrinsic value derived from? What is the backing of Bitcoin? What is the definition of purely cyber infrastructure? Who runs it? How is expansion allocated and its technology upgraded? What inherent technological security risks does it have? [...]"
D. B.: "The Proposed Rule Change does not appear to detail the policy and procedure in event of a bitcoin blockchain fork. "
William Morrison: "The abundance of comments submitted on subject of this ETF speaks clearly: there is a mass of unsophisticated retail investors---most with no previous investing experience---looking to get rich quick or make back losses from the Bitcoin market plunge over the last half year. And of course the many savvy retail and institutional investors more than happy to take advantage of them. [...] For all the comments urging the importance of the United States being at forefront of blockchain or distributed ledger technology and innovation by allowing a Bitcoin ETF, few if any are able to explain why it is hinged on expansion on the wholly speculative nature of this asset class. [...] it is telling that the mention-able examples of companies succeeding in this sector are mining equipment manufacturers (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/23/secretive-chinese-bitcoin-mining-company-may-have-made-as-much-money-as-nvidia-last-year.html) and online cryptocurrency exchanges (https://www.businessinsider.com/binance-cryptocurrency-exchange-profit-prediction-2018-7). In other words, casinos are the biggest profit-makers in the market of gamblers."
Ken I Maher: "[...] There is improvement from 2 years ago when 96% of volume occurred unregulated in China but this leaves 86% of market activity still under no official established regulation against fraudulent trading activity or manipulation. US bitcoin exchanges still blindly and automatedly follow the dominant unregulated markets due to their own thinness of volume and liquidity. [...] More incredible is the emergence of USDT (Tether) a cryptocurrency token issued by a single exchange that claims to be 'pegged' to USD value and unprovenly to be backed by USD reserve. It now commands over 130% of global trading volume compared to all fiat pairs. [...]"
Kash Ranks: "In a world where making a daily living is hard enough, how can you in good conscience, allow a speculative/scam instrument like Bitcoin to exist let alone approve an ETF. Blockchain has its merits but Coins are nothing more than a digital scam which is robbing people of their hard earned money and enabling speculative fervor."
Ran Lagil: "[...] can one claim that the price action of the bitcoin spot market in the unregulated exchanges, which holds the vast majority of volume, as acknowledged by the SEC, doesn’t affect the XBT future market? Of course not. In any financial market where arbitrage is available, the price change in one source will affect the rest of the market. [...] Please find the bellow image which demonstrate the volume manipulation in the ETCBTC market in the world largest Crypto Exchange - Binance. [...]"
Peter Quinn: "Bitcoin is a pure speculation vehicle with no traditional value or commercial/industrial use. It has no fundamentals, is exceptionally volatile and is easily manipulated due to poor market liquidity and no market regulation. A CBOE listed ETF that is proposing to be a passive Bitcoin holding vehicle is nothing more than trying to get a broader pool of investors involved in something that would never be allowed for listing on a regulated stock exchange if it was a company. [...] Additionally, much of the purported size of Bitcoin is an illusion, with "market cap" as reported on private websites such as Coinmarketcap.com taking all coins ever in existence multiplied by an average of the last traded price in dollars. Volume is commonly reported as all Bitcoins traded in dollar value even if, as is the case, most of them did not trade against hard currency at all, instead trading against other cryptocurrencies or Tether, a purported 1:1: USD backed cryptocurrency that has been used to artificially pump the price and is more comparable to counterfeit money. [...]"
Sam Ahn: "I am opposed to the whole idea of bitcoin, because bitcoin does not have intrinsic value and SEC was created to prevent sale of pieces of the blue sky. [...] Bitcoin is a commodity money, which cannot be a store of value without having its own value established before becoming money. "

TL;DR: Robinhood is a great way to get into investing, but the market is volatile, even the professionals lose to pure randomness, and so will you. The time-tested strategy is boring, low-cost index funds like VOO that you hold until you die. And you should concentrate on tax-advantaged accounts like your 401K and IRA before any of that.
Edit: I don't mean this to come off as outrage, or imply that Roosterteeth shouldn't be advertising Robinhood. Robinhood is amazing, I personally have had some great success with it, and was even a little excited to see Roosterteeth advertising it. I have also seen plenty of people see its simplicity, assume that's all there is to investing, and make fatal mistakes, often by buying shit options, or assuming Robinhood Gold is free money. I just want to be a quick buffer between that.
I want to start this off by saying that I am in no way a financial expert. I'm an amateur investor who considers themselves reasonably well informed when it comes to finances and investments. I submit this as an introduction to educating yourself, and will list far more quality resources to learn from at the end.
My Concern
Roosterteeth, Funhaus, and other podcasts I listen to have recently been advertising for Robinhood as a simple way to get into investing, with the implication being that investing is what smart, responsible, rich people do, and you should too. But there's some stipulations to this, and I feel Robinhood and Roosterteeth are both a little flippant about the risks involved, especially when introducing large, inexperienced audiences to the investment world. That being said, investing is important to your long-term prosperity, and Robinhood is great with 0 fees, and its simplification of investments that typically sound far more complicated than they are. But it's important to identify your tolerance to risk, and use this to know what investments you're making, and exactly how risky they are. Below I want to give a basic overview of what exactly stocks and options are, how risky they are, and some general advice surrounding them.
What are Stocks?
When a company wants to raise money quickly, but doesn't want to take out loans, they typically decide to go public. This means they split the company up into shares of stock, each of which represents a small piece of the company. These shares each cost a certain amount of money to buy called their share price. At the time of writing, Apple (AAPL) stock is at $207.48, and there are currently 4,829,926,000 shares of Apple out there. Meaning that $207.48 will buy you 1 / 4,829,926,000 of Apple. This also means that Apple as a company is currently worth 4,829,926,000 * $207.48 = $1,002,113,000,000. This price is dictated largely by how confident people are in the future of the company. If a report comes out that Apple is doing really well, the stock price will likely go up, and vice versa.
What are Options?
Options are another security (security is a largely general term used for investments you can buy) that are not stocks themselves, but are contracts regarding what you can do with stocks. They're more complicated than just buying and selling stocks, and can be far more risky. There's a lot to them, but the basic idea is that you are buying the option to buy or sell a stock at a certain price, by a certain time. There are two basic types of options, put and call options. A call option is where you believe that the stock price will go up, a put option is where you believe a stock price will go down. I'll leave Khan Academy to explain the specifics as they can do far better than I. The short and skinny of it being that options are more complicated, riskier, and you should take some serious caution before jumping into this space. Options are where I simultaneously love and hate Robinhood, as they make it very easy for people to understand them, but simultaneously make it far too easy for people who shouldn't be investing in them, to do so.
How Does Robinhood Fit Into This?
Robinhood is a brokerage, which is effectively a store through which you can buy stocks and options. There are tons of brokerages, some popular ones being Schwab, Fidelity, and TD Ameritrade. They all offer different services and products at different prices. The one point we'll focus on is commission fees. A commission fee is how much you are charged for the privilege of buying a stock or option, which is typically around $8 per trade. So if I bought 1 share of Apple for $200, it would usually cost me $208. Robinhood is unique in that it charges $0 per trade. It's also unique in that it's primarily a simple mobile app, while other brokerages are far more complicated.
Robinhood Gold
My immediate advice, do not touch this. My main criticism with Robinhood is not really explaining what this is. It is a loan that you are effectively gambling with. If you are a professional (which means you've gone to school, and gotten a job doing this stuff, not that you've made $1000 on lucky trades) this can be useful. But even the pros get absolutely wrecked by using this kind of stuff, and I absolutely urge you to not touch this. Using Robinhood Gold (otherwise known as margin) in the investing world exposes you to far more risk.
Cool, How Do I Get Rich?
Slowly. There's tons of cases of people making it big with Bitcoin, some bullshit penny stock, or a lucky options trade that makes them millions in a matter of days. These are the exception, not the rule. Smart investing is typically a slow and boring process. Warren Buffett, the greatest investor of all time, espouses the idea of long-term investments in good companies. This has made him one of the richest people in the world, making him someone you want to listen to on the topic. His advice? Don't bother with Robinhood. Use your company's 401K to its fullest extent, and buy boring, stable ETFs. ETFs are a large collection of stocks that track the general direction of the stock market. Over 10, 20, 30 years, these consistently make money. They're not sexy, and won't make you rich in a few days, but will reliably make you comfortable far in the future. These are the responsible thing to do, and will ensure you spend retirement without a lot of stress. Check out /investing's wiki which has a lot of great info on this.
But I Want to be Rich Now!
You won't. Or rather, it's statistically unlikely that you will. The odds are better than if you were buying lottery tickets, but they still aren't great. If however, you've got a gambler's penchant, and are totally fine with losing 100% of your investment in a matter of hours, you can try actively trading options. Once you are done looking through /investing's wiki and have done the responsible thing, I authorize you to do the dumb shit and expose yourself to the whims of luck. A community attempting this path is /wallstreetbets, and they openly joke about how stupid they are for attempting this. They're extremely crass, and exhibit every symptom of a gambling addiction. If you decide to go down this route, you should absolutely only use money you are willing to lose. Treat it like a casino, where you know that eventually, you will absolutely lose all of that money. You're just paying for the hope that you won't.
Further Reading
There's plenty of resources out there, here's a collection of my favorites.
Through the Internet

At your Library

Never pay for investing clubs, or those YouTube channels that have hosts with ferraris telling you they can make you rich. You're buying them the ferraris, when you could have bought a book that will be far more valuable for a fraction of the price.

I've been day/swing trading in 2017 with $140K portfolio. During the year I've been up to $180K, down to $130K, and now at the end of 2017 I am back to where I started.
I started to form an opinion that daytrading is just a small step above gambling. I think I can make "smarter" decisions trading in stock market than gambling at a casino. I subscribed to screeners and mailing lists. I bought equipment. I study charts. I sat in chat rooms. After 1 year I have nothing to show for it. I am sure people will tell me that I am just a poor investor, but after asking around I still have to find individuals who make comfortable living daytrading.
For those who are considering daytrading please remember that it is a full time job. I have a 9-5 from home employment with megacorp, but even the extra freedom granted by working from home is not sufficient to properly monitor all current and potential investments.
I kept track of all my investments by strategy that I used. My most profitable investment strategies were

"RSI Reversal" - stock reaches overbought or oversold levels, and I trade the opposite direction expecting reversal.
"1PM Resume" - my own strategy, where I see the stocks that make the most gains with volume prior to lunch, and then buy around 12:45 expecting the trend to resume.
"Whole Number" - if stock breaks a whole number like $10.00, then I would trade expecting the trend to continue.

For each of these it's also important to monitor market sentiment. I would not trade long if market is bearish, even if a specific trade satisfies my conditions.
So what should be my plan for 2018? Play existing winning strategies? Buy ETFs and leave them for a year? What would be your advice.

TL;DR:

Blockstream (fiat-financed by companies like AXA - which happens to be the 2nd-most connected financial firm in the world) is suppressing Bitcoin price - currently at 1000 "bits" = 1 USD (where 1 "bit" is one-millionth of a bitcoin) - ie 1 BTC = 1000 USD.
They're doing this by suppressing Bitcoin volume - by suppressing Bitcoin blocksize - in order to prevent debt- & war- & oil-backed fiat currencies (USD, etc.) from collapsing relative to Bitcoin.
AXA/Blockstream's suppression of the Bitcoin price is easy to see in Bitcoin price/volume graphs: Bitcoin price and volume were tightly correlated (almost in lockstep) until late 2014 - which is when Blockstream came on the scene. From then on, the price has been suppressed - due to AXA/Blockstream spreading their lies and propaganda that "Bitcoin can't scale on-chain".
The way to stop AXA/Blockstream's Bitcoin price suppression and let the Bitcoin price continue to rise again... is to let Bitcoin volume continue to rise again - by letting Bitcoin blocksize continue to rise again - by using the market-based blocksize supported by Bitcoin Unlimited.
We actually can reach 1 bit = 1 USD or 1 BTC = 1'000'000 USD ("Million-Dollar Bitcoin") on-chain. All it would require is (a) the price doubling 10 times (2¹⁰ = 1024), and (b) the blocksize increasing by the square root of this (in accordance with Metcalfe's Law) - ie the blocksize would have to double only five times (2⁵ = 32).
2⁵ = 32 MB blocksize (which Satoshi actually did hard-code) would support 2¹⁰ = 1000x higher price on-chain ("Million-Dollar Bitcoin") - without requiring off-chain pseudo-Bitcoin Lightning ~~Network~~ Central Banking Hubs!

~ YouDoTheMath u/ydtm
Details:
(1) Who is AXA? Why and how would they want to suppress the Bitcoin price?

Blockstream is now controlled by the Bilderberg Group - seriously! AXA Strategic Ventures, co-lead investor for Blockstream's $55 million financing round, is the investment arm of French insurance giant AXA Group - whose CEO Henri de Castries has been chairman of the Bilderberg Group since 2012.

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/47zfzt/blockstream_is_now_controlled_by_the_bilderberg/

If Bitcoin becomes a major currency, then tens of trillions of dollars on the "legacy ledger of fantasy fiat" will evaporate, destroying AXA, whose CEO is head of the Bilderbergers. This is the real reason why AXA bought Blockstream: to artificially suppress Bitcoin volume and price with 1MB blocks.

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/4r2pw5/if_bitcoin_becomes_a_major_currency_then_tens_of/

The insurance company with the biggest exposure to the 1.2 quadrillion dollar (ie, 1200 TRILLION dollar) derivatives casino is AXA. Yeah, that AXA, the company whose CEO is head of the Bilderberg Group, and whose "venture capital" arm bought out Bitcoin development by "investing" in Blockstream.

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/4k1r7v/the_insurance_company_with_the_biggest_exposure/

Greg Maxwell used to have intelligent, nuanced opinions about "max blocksize", until he started getting paid by AXA, whose CEO is head of the Bilderberg Group - the legacy financial elite which Bitcoin aims to disintermediate. Greg always refuses to address this massive conflict of interest. Why?

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/4mlo0z/greg_maxwell_used_to_have_intelligent_nuanced/

Who owns the world? (1) Barclays, (2) AXA, (3) State Street Bank. (Infographic in German - but you can understand it without knowing much German: "Wem gehört die Welt?" = "Who owns the world?") AXA is the #2 company with the most economic poweconnections in the world. And AXA owns Blockstream.

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/5btu02/who_owns_the_world_1_barclays_2_axa_3_state/
(2) What evidence do we have that Core and AXA-owned Blockstream are actually impacting (suppressing) the Bitcoin price?

This trader's price & volume graph / model predicted that we should be over $10,000 USD/BTC by now. The model broke in late 2014 - when AXA-funded Blockstream was founded, and started spreading propaganda and crippleware, centrally imposing artificially tiny blocksize to suppress the volume & price.

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/5obe2m/this_traders_price_volume_graph_model_predicted/

This graph shows Bitcoin price and volume (ie, blocksize of transactions on the blockchain) rising hand-in-hand in 2011-2014. In 2015, Core/Blockstream tried to artificially freeze the blocksize - and artificially froze the price. Bitcoin Classic will allow volume - and price - to freely rise again.

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/44xrw4/this_graph_shows_bitcoin_price_and_volume_ie/

Also see a similar graph in u/Peter__R's recent article on Medium - where the graph clearly shows the same Bitcoin price suppression - ie price uncoupling from adoption and dipping below the previous tightly correlated trend - starting right at that fateful moment when Blockstream came on the scene and told Bitcoiners that we can't have nice things anymore like on-chain scaling and increasing adoption and price: late 2014.

Graph - Visualizing Metcalfe's Law: The relationship between Bitcoin's market cap and the square of the number of transactions

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/574l2q/graph_visualizing_metcalfes_law_the_relationship/

Bitcoin has its own E = mc² law: Market capitalization is proportional to the square of the number of transactions. But, since the number of transactions is proportional to the (actual) blocksize, then Blockstream's artificial blocksize limit is creating an artificial market capitalization limit!

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/4dfb3bitcoin_has_its_own_e_mc2_law_market/

1 BTC = 64 000 USD would be > $1 trillion market cap - versus $7 trillion market cap for gold, and $82 trillion of "money" in the world. Could "pure" Bitcoin get there without SegWit, Lightning, or Bitcoin Unlimited? Metcalfe's Law suggests that 8MB blocks could support a price of 1 BTC = 64 000 USD

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/5lzez2/1_btc_64_000_usd_would_be_1_trillion_market_cap/
(3) "But no - they'd never do that!"
Actually - yes, they would. And "they" already are. For years, governments and central bankers have been spending trillions in fiat on wars - and eg suppressing precious metals prices by flooding the market with "fake (paper) gold" and "fake (paper) silver" - to prevent the debt- & war-backed PetroDollar from collapsing.

The owners of Blockstream are spending $76 million to do a "controlled demolition" of Bitcoin by manipulating the Core devs & the Chinese miners. This is cheap compared to the $ trillions spent on the wars on Iraq & Libya - who also defied the Fed / PetroDollar / BIS private central banking cartel.

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/5q6kjo/the_owners_of_blockstream_are_spending_76_million/

JPMorgan suppresses gold & silver prices to prop up the USDollar - via "naked short selling" of GLD & SLV ETFs. Now AXA (which owns $94 million of JPMorgan stock) may be trying to suppress Bitcoin price - via tiny blocks. But AXA will fail - because the market will always "maximize coinholder value"

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/4vjne5/jpmorgan_suppresses_gold_silver_prices_to_prop_up/

Why did Blockstream CTO u/nullc Greg Maxwell risk being exposed as a fraud, by lying about basic math? He tried to convince people that Bitcoin does not obey Metcalfe's Law (claiming that Bitcoin price & volume are not correlated, when they obviously are). Why is this lie so precious to him?

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/57dsgz/why_did_blockstream_cto_unullc_greg_maxwell_risk/

If you had $75 million invested in Blockstream, and you saw that stubbornly freezing the blocksize at 1 MB for the next year was clogging up the network and could kill the currency before LN even had a chance to roll out, wouldn't you support an immediate increase to 2 MB to protect your investment?

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/48xm28/if_you_had_75_million_invested_in_blockstream_and/

[Tinfoil] What do these seven countries have in common? (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran) In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

https://np.reddit.com/bitcoin_uncensored/comments/3yits0/tinfoil_what_do_these_seven_countries_have_in/
(4) What can we do to fight back and let Bitcoin's price continue to rise again?

Reject the Central Blocksize Planners at Core/Blockstream - and the censors at r\bitcoin.
Install Bitcoin Unlimited, which supports market-based blocksize in accordance with Satoshi's original vision.
Be patient - and persistent - and decentralized - and Bitcoin will inevitably win.

The moderators of r\bitcoin have now removed a post which was just quotes by Satoshi Nakamoto.

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/49l4uh/the_moderators_of_rbitcoin_have_now_removed_a/

"Notice how anyone who has even remotely supported on-chain scaling has been censored, hounded, DDoS'd, attacked, slandered & removed from any area of Core influence. Community, business, Hearn, Gavin, Jeff, XT, Classic, Coinbase, Unlimited, ViaBTC, Ver, Jihan, Bitcoin.com, btc" ~ u/randy-lawnmole

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/5omufj/notice_how_anyone_who_has_even_remotely_supported/

"I was initially in the small block camp. My worry was decentralization & node count going down as a result. But when Core refused to increase the limit to 4MB, which at the time no Core developer thought would have a negative effect, except Luke-Jr, I began to see ulterior motives." u/majorpaynei86

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/5748kb/i_was_initially_in_the_small_block_camp_my_worry/

Satoshi Nakamoto, October 04, 2010, 07:48:40 PM "It can be phased in, like: if (blocknumber > 115000) maxblocksize = largerlimit / It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete."

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/3wo9pb/satoshi_nakamoto_october_04_2010_074840_pm_it_can/

The debate is not "SHOULD THE BLOCKSIZE BE 1MB VERSUS 1.7MB?". The debate is: "WHO SHOULD DECIDE THE BLOCKSIZE?" (1) Should an obsolete temporary anti-spam hack freeze blocks at 1MB? (2) Should a centralized dev team soft-fork the blocksize to 1.7MB? (3) OR SHOULD THE MARKET DECIDE THE BLOCKSIZE?

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/5pcpec/the_debate_is_not_should_the_blocksize_be_1mb/

"Bitcoin Unlimited ... makes it more convenient for miners and nodes to adjust the blocksize cap settings through a GUI menu, so users don't have to mod the Core code themselves (like some do now). There would be no reliance on Core (or XT) to determine 'from on high' what the options are." - ZB

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/3zki3h/bitcoin_unlimited_makes_it_more_convenient_fo

Bitcoin Unlimited is the real Bitcoin, in line with Satoshi's vision. Meanwhile, BlockstreamCoin+RBF+SegWitAsASoftFork+LightningCentralizedHub-OfflineIOUCoin is some kind of weird unrecognizable double-spendable non-consensus-driven fiat-financed offline centralized settlement-only non-P2P "altcoin"

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/57brcb/bitcoin_unlimited_is_the_real_bitcoin_in_line/

The Nine Miners of China: "Core is a red herring. Miners have alternative code they can run today that will solve the problem. Choosing not to run it is their fault, and could leave them with warehouses full of expensive heating units and income paid in worthless coins." – tsontar

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/3xhejm/the_nine_miners_of_china_core_is_a_red_herring/?st=iz7029hc&sh=c6063b52

ViABTC: "Why I support BU: We should give the question of block size to the free market to decide. It will naturally adjust to ever-improving network & technological constraints. Bitcoin Unlimited guarantees that block size will follow what the Bitcoin network is capable of handling safely."

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/574g5l/viabtc_why_i_support_bu_we_should_give_the/

Fun facts about ViaBTC: Founded by expert in distributed, highly concurrent networking from "China's Google". Inspired by Viaweb (first online store, from LISP guru / YCombinator founder Paul Graham). Uses a customized Bitcoin client on high-speed network of clusters in US, Japan, Europe, Hong Kong.

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/57e0t8/fun_facts_about_viabtc_founded_by_expert_in/

Bitcoin's specification (eg: Excess Blocksize (EB) & Acceptance Depth (AD), configurable via Bitcoin Unlimited) can, should & always WILL be decided by ALL the miners & users - not by a single FIAT-FUNDED, CENSORSHIP-SUPPORTED dev team (Core/Blockstream) & miner (BitFury) pushing SegWit 1.7MB blocks

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/5u1r2d/bitcoins_specification_eg_excess_blocksize_eb/

The number of blocks being mined by Bitcoin Unlimited is now getting very close to surpassing the number of blocks being mined by SegWit! More and more people are supporting BU's MARKET-BASED BLOCKSIZE - because BU avoids needless transaction delays and ultimately increases Bitcoin adoption & price!

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/5rdhzh/the_number_of_blocks_being_mined_by_bitcoin/

I think the Berlin Wall Principle will end up applying to Blockstream as well: (1) The Berlin Wall took longer than everyone expected to come tumbling down. (2) When it did finally come tumbling down, it happened faster than anyone expected (ie, in a matter of days) - and everyone was shocked.

https://np.reddit.com/btc/comments/4kxtq4/i_think_the_berlin_wall_principle_will_end_up/

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