Okay folks, so I have a bit of an impromptu video for you today. I'm supposed to be on vacation, but you know, I just couldn't resist making a video. There's a lot going on. Number one: We need to talk about what's up with the market right now, or rather, what's left of it.

Number two: We have to talk about what is working because there are some energy stocks that are just going parabolic right now and you're going to want to know about them if you are trying to participate in the short term oil and overall energy commodity trade. And then lastly, we have to talk about what you need to get ready for because there's a big catalyst coming this week. You probably already know what it is, but if you don't I'm going to talk about it at the end of the video. Feel free to check the time stamps below.

But let's get right into the work. The state of the market is, quite frankly, tense. You've got a continued downtrend below our red directional Sma line, and it's both a technical and a fundamental macro mess. You often have equities bounce back and forth, but it seems increasingly that no one knows what the hell they are doing.

Wall Street as a whole has no idea what to think. They made forecasts for 2022 that did not even consider the possibility of a Ukraine invasion. It reminds me of when nearly every analyst had to throw their predictions out of the window in March of 2020.. there are just some things that you really can't predict and the impacts of this crisis are, of course, far and wide.

In the latest retaliation, you finally got some scaling up of sanctions towards Russia's biggest sector, which is oil and Gas. Public pressure has led big companies like Shell and Bp to self-sanction from making new purchases of Russian energy. But as of this morning, we saw a big American retaliation from the Bonded Administration which announced a ban on the entire import of Russian energy. Meanwhile, the big buyer of Russian energy, the Eu has pledged to cut Russian gas imports by two-thirds Before the end of the year, Russian Deputy Prime Minister, Alexander Novak said quote It is absolutely clear that a rejection of Russian oil would lead to catastrophic consequences for the global energy market.

The surge in price would be unpredictable. It would be 300 a barrel if not more. Russia has gone so far as threatening to prematurely cut off gas before the Eu can cut it off themselves. Meanwhile, crude oil prices are, of course, just off the charts.

Whether you are talking New York listed or European listed, it's insane. You're heading to a new all-time high breakout in both. And clearly the market isn't happy with this. outside of the whole Fed tightening and inflation thing, which by the way, we have a Cpi report on Thursday in the Fomc meeting next week.

The truth is that increasing energy prices is a huge direct hit to the profitability of most companies when companies have to pay more to transport and provide goods and services to people, what happens? Well, they have less profits. If they have less profits, their companies are worth less. This comes at the same time where, guess what? The market doesn't want to pay as many multiples for good fundamentals anyways. So you have a perfect storm of companies getting worse and worse in terms of fundamentals, and also people wanting to pay less and less for them.

And obviously, a solution to this problem, which has been floated is a U.s increase in production of oil and overall energy commodities. Because there are a lot of substantial natural resources here, Us crude oil production is still well below pre-pandemic levels, and while it's slated to go up the next couple years dramatically, it's not rising fast enough. And of course, the overall constraint on domestic energy production and transportation is a mixed political and economical issue. Some folks blame the Biden Administration cancelling big projects like the Keystone Pipeline and promoting the transition to clean energy in ways that are punishing to domestic productions of traditional forms of energy.

In fact, just a couple months ago, the Biden Administration considered hiking royalty rates for drillers despite energy prices going up huge for everyday Americans at that time. Of course, that's aged even worse by now. But on the other hand, the Biden administration has defended themselves, saying that they have approved 9 000 permits, but they're not being used by companies. And as we've discussed before in the past, there are some cases where companies have been very, very slow to drill and increase production back to where it was pre-pandemic But the Ceo of the American Petroleum Institute responded on Bloomberg saying that just because you have a lease doesn't mean there's actually oil and gas in that lease, and there has to be a lot of development that occurs between leasing and then ultimately permitting for that acreage to be productive.

The group also said that a lot of the policies that have been put in place by this administration, including a ban on new development of Federal lands and Federal waters, are really hindering American energy development during a critical time. He says that royalty fees, for example, increasing on drilling, discourages investment, so he asks, are there any plans to reverse any of these policies to then encourage investment? Now I'm not here to push an agenda and I encourage you to look into these issues yourself. Like most issues, it is a mixed back, but my take is that the Us and Eu's focus on shifting to clean energy is the right idea over the long run, right? But that's a long-term transition. You can't transition overnight, and for some reason, we've decided that in the meantime we should make our domestic industries less competitive on a global scale by putting huge regulatory burdens on them, Which of course, increases our reliance on countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Iraq to supply those same forms of journey energy.

I'm sorry, but you're not saving the earth if you're simply moving your oil production from Texas to Saudi Arabia or to Russia. It's the same planet. If you actually go on Google maps, you can see that all these countries they're all on the one planet. As long as we or our allies depend directly on countries that aren't allies, or at least don't have the same geopolitical interests as us to provide us with oil and gas, it's a huge risk, even if the Us decides to stop importing any oil.

If our allies get their oil from countries like Russia, it creates a risk for us like we're seeing right now. If you have to fund and rely on countries that oftentimes are working against your geopolitical interests, well, that's a huge damn problem. Okay next though, what is working? What is positive? Charlie? Well, small cap energy stocks are in a huge bull market right now. They did take a little bit of a cool down today towards market close, but but the disruption trade is going pretty well.

Our Imp ran huge over the last week. This was our spec energy disruption escalation play that we've briefed on in Zip Trader U nearly every day since the 22nd of February. It steadily climbed throughout that period from just around 60 cents to 975 as the crisis in Ukraine has escalated. Obviously, I didn't know how much it was going to run and it was an escalation play.

And we got escalation, which is why I ran. But still, I'm not complaining either, especially in this market condition where everything else wants to go down and go down dramatically. That said, I am of the opinion that this oil crisis is going to get worse before it gets better, and a lot of these plays are going to continue to have a lot more runts. What Is Imp, despite its unfortunate ticker name.

Well, Imperial Petroleum is an international shipping transportation company specialized in the transportation of various petroleum and petrochemical products. Why did it run so extremely charlie well? Partially because increased prices and transportation issues create huge, anticipated demand for its industry, but increasingly because of the speculative dynamic. There's this dynamic where if you have one type of stock highlighted either the Mj sector, Evs, the Nfts metaverse, whatever it is, if you have one big sector highlighted, everybody tries to buy up all the small caps in that sector that have any sort of potential because those can run the most. And then when you have one or two huge runners, what happens? Well, everybody starts trying to find the next big runners.

Sure, you could buy Chevron or Exxon and that is the sector that has done the best consistently in the overall market over the past few periods. And perhaps you could luck out and get a 40 return. Or you could buy Imp on a speculative trade basis and control your risk to play the upside run that took it up like 1500 percent in a few short weeks. The con of these trades is they're very, very violent in both directions, right? You can gain a lot, but you can also lose a lot.

But when you have such a strong push into a certain industry, it creates this dynamic where, hey, even if you catch just a quarter of that move, a quarter of a 1500 run, well, all of a sudden, it's a pretty damn good trade. And because so many people think that way all of a sudden, you get all these people buying into these stocks and you have so many running at the same time. And we've seen this in so many different sectors over the last couple of years. And of course, Back Capital likes to always find the next spec runner.

Cei. This is another popular retail one that we began briefing on in Zpu since around late February. They've also been enjoying substantial inflows because of the supply shock. There's a big cult following behind this stock.

Let me tell you, um, Nine is one we started briefing on yesterday as a new disruption play. It ended up tanking after we briefed on it at Two Six Just. But then it ran up to 817.. If you're going to play this, you have to have to have to have a clear entry and exit plan.

These are extremely volatile, which is both a huge benefit and a huge drawback depending on how you play it and I by no means want to create the impression that I know to a T how to find these. To find these, I literally made a spreadsheet, wrote down characteristics of what was running in the current market condition, and tried to find plays that match those characteristics to see what would run afterwards. That's how we found Inp. That's how we found Cei.

That's how we found most recently, Nine. How do you find these yourself? Well, obviously, Charlie is a relentless capitalist and we'd love to have you as a member in Zip Trader. You, You'll of course get access to our daily morning briefings where we brief on all the catalysts that we see every morning, but I also strongly encourage you to try this on your own. First, write down some of the characteristics of stocks that are running right now and the only ones that are really running consistently are energy stocks and maybe some biotech place.

Look at the top runners every single day, write down the characteristics of what is making them run, and then look for similarities, and then try to find other stocks that match those similarities. And then once you've done that consistently and you keep finding runners, then you can start planning entry and exit points on those runners so that you could try to capture some of those moves. Now, this isn't the same strategy as a high conviction strategy where you can just buy and hold and then hold to a price target. This is a strategy that involves you trying to capture momentum.

which means it's a lot more speculative and a lot more volatile, but can do very, very well over certain time horizons in certain asset classes that are in a huge momentum rally like energy. But keep in mind folks, the goal of finding plays isn't finding plays that hold their runs because they never hold their runs, especially if they're running really fast. The goal is that you find a run that you're able to play for a profit and then get out if you look at something like Indo, which we did brief on on the third as a new foreign oil disruption play. It ran from like 20 to 86 in a couple trading periods, but then today it took a breath and it plummeted down to 35.

If you don't have an exit plan, it's tough to hold on to the move. You have to be able to create in yourself some sort of logic to get out of the emotions of the masses. If everybody's trying to buy a stock to the moon, you're trying to think. okay, well, how do I exploit that trade? How do I go in and have a controlled entry and exit plan? Something that considers what's going to happen when it starts dumping what is my level at which I'm going to say okay, now it's time for me to take some profits off because it's likely going to drop what is my level that I'm going to take profits at.

That could be for a short-term trade. At least that could be a break of an Sma line, a stop loss, so on, and so forth as the energy trade continues. These are things to think about if you do want to trade it. Some of the other plays that we've talked about recently in the briefings and I do want you to know about on the channel are clean energy plays like Sun W, F, Cell, and Pola, which are back on the uptrend as energy crunches provide more demand for all forms of energy.

We'll try our best to keep you updated with plays in our daily morning briefings, which continue regardless of whether I'm posting on the channel this week or not. but there's not much we can do in terms of the market condition and how many opportunities they give us right now. They're giving us a lot with energy next week, they might not, but it's all about showing up consistently and doing the work and having clear entry and exit plans and managing your risk. And if you're a high conviction trader or you do a combination of both, which I do recommend at least entertainmently wise, Well, my suggestion is make sure that you find companies you like, value them at what price you think is appropriate, and then when they get discounted, just think, Okay, now it's time to start slowly buying the dip.

The dip can keep dipping for quite a while. We're in a muck right now, but over the long run I think you'll come out ahead. But anyways, moving on to what to get ready for. So the Cpi report is coming out on Thursday.

This is going to be for February, and if you go back to the January report, the biggest issues were in fuel oil, energy services, electricity, utility, and overall commodities and transportation services. These things did get worse in February, but they didn't really dramatically accelerate until we headed into March. Which means that if February's report is hot, which in all likelihood it probably will be, people are going to be thinking, oh no, the worst hasn't even come yet. We haven't even had all of the huge massive Ukraine Russia pricing pressures factored in in any meaningful way, because again, hey, February was bad.

It was terrible. But most of the acceleration happened in March the last like eight days. So people continue to see that huge pricing pressure wave that we had in January into February. People are really going to be shook about the trajectory for this next upcoming month.

Remember, there's a bit of a delay in terms of pricing pressures everywhere. When energy costs go up, guess what companies have to spend more money to pay for energy? and when companies have to do that? What happens while they raise prices on their consumers? Or they have to take an earnings cut, which doesn't seem to be happening quite yet. Although I do think that's going to happen towards the end of the year. So right now, we're kind of at the beginning of what could be a stage two of inflation spiraling pressure, and the markets aren't going to be too happy about this.

especially considering that the Fomc meeting is next week and the Fed is expected to raise rates for the first time. So far, we know that the Fed hasn't wanted to be super reactionary to this new crisis, and they always tend to be slow to react to any new crisis anyways, unless it's lowering interest rates. In which case, they do that very, very rapidly. But if you're capital and you're in the market, you're worried about these two big catalysts.

unless you're just sort of parking your money there for a very, very long time. which I do think is a smart thing to do if you're a long-term conviction holder. But any other situation, if you're a hedge fund right now or an institutional player, you're thinking, what are the reasons for me to be in this market? This is dirty. There's so many bad things happening right now.

My head is spinning. Earnings are going to get crunched. Earnings are probably going to get crunched anyways. The Fed may have to raise interest rates so much that your head is going to get cut off.

There's just so many reasons to be fearful and dysphoria right now, but there's also not many other good places to put your money. So the market's like what do we do and my view and I never want to leave you with a negative tone at the end of any of my videos is that in the long run, we know what's going to happen. This dip and this fear period is going to get bought up and it's going to be one of the best opportunities for creating excess alpha on the market that we've seen in history. Probably for long-term conviction traders, you have some of the best deals now and you may get even better deals in the future for some of the best companies that are going to grow huge.

And we know that the long-term driver of stock market growth is what well, revenue growth and earnings growth over the long run. But in the short run, it's based on multiples which have a lot to do with fear and dysphoria and what the Fed's doing. So for long-term conviction traders, this is a pretty damn good market for you to start establishing positions in a slow, steady and very well thought out strategic way with of course, a lot of patience and a very, very strong stomach. And it's also a very, very good opportunity for short-term traders to start learning how to trade some of these short-term opportunities in gas and oil sectors and overall commodities and anything that's running in these fear-based periods, and we'll make sure to be here with you every step of the way throughout this journey.

Anyways, folks that caps off this video. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us below or join us on Ziptrader Snorkel if you'd like to join us in Ziptraderu for our lessons, our private chat, our daily morning briefings, as well as our full price target list. I'll go ahead and put a link to it below and have a good one and I'll see you in the next video.