For a 15 day free trial to Tackle Trading, enter the code justicepro when creating a new account at www.tackletrading.com. Offer valid until June 19. When Steve Huang set out to create his Theta Fade system, his proprietary end-of-week theta trading system, he didn’t just go out and start trading one day. He backtested, paper traded, and practiced over three years. He confirmed that it was profitable and performed consistently before putting it into action. All that testing paid off, too: it grosses 2–4% per week with manageable downside risk risk. He also started small; with smaller trades, you expose yourself to less risk as you properly fine-tune a system. Jumping in with both feet using your entire account on an untested system would just ask for trouble. However, over time, as a system is proven, you can increase your size. Steve has set aside $25K for an account that he only trades Theta Fade with.  It’s now up 24%, or $6100, from the first day of trading in February. See the results in the Theta Fade page in the TackleTrading Trading Room.  Should you wish to learn more about Theta Fade, head over to Tackle Trading and check it out every Friday afternoon.      

  For a free 30 day trial of Metastock, visit: www.metastock.com/tackletrading Jeffrey Gibby started at Metastock 18 years ago, and it's been a fun journey. Not only has he helped develop the world's #1 rated stock scanning software, he's had the opportunity to journey around the world to help people make more informed trades and trade more efficiently. From assisting Sheikhs to training folks down under, Jeffrey's travels with Metastock have taken him all over. The software itself is worth the trip. Metastock, now in version 14 just released this year, has been around for over 30 years with experienced traders & programmers making each new version more robust than the last while still keeping the system intuitive to use. The latest feature to be introduced in version 14 is personal forecasting: you can make your own foward-looking models and Metastock will calculate the probabilities of such a model actually occurring on the trading floor. This is in addition to other features that have become standard by now: backtesting capability, over 250 built-in indicators, and standard forecasting.      

    China is working to position the RMB as a reserve currency, possibly to even out the USD as the world's oil reserve currency. One a currency that wasn't used outside of China, roughly 30% of all international business done with China is now in RMB. Through careful manipulation of the RMB's value, China now possesses the fifth largest reserve currency in the world. Quite an increase from 15th not 10 years ago. Accompanying this meteoric rise in the RMB are calls for the RMB to join the IMF's SDR as the fifth reserve currency (the four currently being the USD, GBP, JPY, and EUR). Should this happen, it may even allow SDRs to move to currency status itself due to the strength of the five currencies that would make up its value. One of the main proponents for the RMB joining the SDR is George Soros, who likely has an RMB position driving his recent extreme comments regarding the RMB, and he tends to act around events of great import.  

With the impending interest rate hike later this year in either June or September, preparing for what will happen in the market will help your portfolio survive the initial rockiness of such an announcement. Such preparation can pay off particularly well if you're a cash flow trader: rising interest rates bring increased volatility to the market, and increased volatility drives options pricing higher. If you're selling options and placing covered calls, this is great news; it's just a matter of waiting for the Fed to actually act and initiate the interest rate increase.  

Recession indicators can be difficult to read for the average consumer. Fed-speak can be difficult to decipher, and reading the market tends to be on a day delay at the minimum for a non-trader. There are four key statistics that people in the know tend to look to: industrial production numbers, real personal income, nonfarm employment, and real estate sales. The numbers for all four of these statistics are tepid with nonfarm employment and real estate sales being of particular note. On the face of the recent employment reports, the number of employed individuals is up. It tends not to take into account the age of said employees, though. Many generation Y and millenials are actually underemployed or unemployed due to older people re-entering the workforce and taking positions that are normally occupied by people new to the workforce. Further, real estate sales saw only roughly 25% of total home purchases from the previous year to be made by first-time purchasers while a healthy level for such buyers is about 40%. This means fewer people entering the supporting marketplaces, as well: fewer appliances purchased, less spent on general home improvement, and so forth. The key driver in this drop is suspected to be the sizable amounts of student debt preventing, once again, generation Y and millenials from getting a mortgage due to the payments still being made on student loans. Four of the 10 major economies are in recession, with the rest in stagnation and recession looming. The US can be argued to be in stagnation right now. Is recession around the corner?  

Mondays, historically, don't have crazy price action short of weekend news regarding a particular stock or sector. That said, there is action, and taking a look at the calendar of upcoming economic reports can help determine how much action there may be both and Monday and throughout the week. Some reports are more important than others in shaping the overall market. For traders, the reports to pay attention to are unemployment (with an eye to where the number may actually be higher or lower than reported), the PMI manufacturing report, the GDP reports, and the minutes of any FOMC meeting. These reports both drive the markets and give an idea to their general health. For example, both manufacturing and housing are showing low levels similar to just prior to the subprime crisis of 2008. Such knowledge is helpful in protecting your portfolio by both knowing when to further hedge and when to look out for the impending bearish market. --- Trading Justice on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/trading-justice/id894392736?mt=2 Trading Justice on Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/trading-justice Trading Justice on tunein: http://tunein.com/radio/Trading-Justice-Podcast-p724120/