Consider Future Events

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In this video, I want to just quickly talk about the importance of just glancing ahead a little bit on the trading timeline and considering future events that may affect the stock position you’re in.

Right now, we have up to a chart of Home Depot, and we don't have a position in Home Depot right now, but if we were to enter a position in Home Depot, it’d be pretty important to know as we’re getting closer to earnings.

Obviously when Home Depot might report earnings or when it might have a dividend or possibly a stock split where something important that the company might announce that may affect the price of the underlying stock and they cause it to jump or implied volatility to move erratically in one direction or another.

I just wanted to show you how we do it here at Option Alpha and the main way that we do it is just by looking at the charts and extending our charts to the right by about 40 to 50 bars or days.

This isn’t a default setting, and if you need help setting up your platform, we do have a platform setup service that we do. It’s a one-time fee and I’ll setup your platform custom just for you, and then we jump on a coaching call for about an hour talking about that and any other questions that you have on options trading.

But you can go into Thinkorswim and mess around with the settings and extend your chart out to the right about 40 to 50 bars. What that's going to do is that's going to encompass or highlight any of the corporate actions that are coming up in the future.

In this case, we do know that at some point just beyond February expiration, Home Depot is going to announce earnings. This is important because this will dictate whether we make a trade in February or March and if we make a trade in February, are we going to trade it differently because of this earnings announcement that’s coming out.

Not to say that this is a make-or-break type of stuff that we need to know, but it is important to glance out into the future and see what's coming up so that you’re at least prepared.

If you don’t have Thinkorswim or you have some other broker platform that doesn’t allow you to quickly see into the future and see if something is coming up like dividends or earnings, I also did a very quick search on Yahoo Finance and came up with some corporate actions and upcoming events.

If you go to any ticker symbol in Yahoo and then on the left-hand side, just go down to “company events,” then you'll see that same earnings announcement that we saw on our charts, we just have to dig a little bit deeper for them.

It does create an added layer of steps that you have to take as you enter a trade, but in this case, it’s very easy as you can see here to set an alert or set a reminder inside of your calendar, so that you’re aware of it if you wanted to be aware of it and it also has all of the company filings and dividends as well.

So everything that you need to know is in here. You don't have to have Thinkorswim as your broker to see into the future and prescreen for some of these upcoming and future earnings and dividends.

As always, I hope you guys enjoy these quick videos. If you have any comments or questions about it, please add it right below in the membership area and the page for this lesson. Otherwise, until next time, happy trading!