Where do you find your trading headspace?

How do you get to a place where you can immerse yourself in “the Zone” to think deeply about trades, strategies, strategizing, or new ways to approach risk management?

For me, far and away the best way to enter this zone is to go for a long walk – preferably in the mountains or in a forest. Just me, maybe my dog, and the sound of the wind whispering in the trees.

On Wednesday night, I returned from four days in the Redwoods National & State Parks of Northern California. Me and a friend hiked nearly 35 miles total.

I cannot begin to describe how amazingly beautiful this corner of the world is. It was my first time there. I took some pictures and videos, but it does not do it justice. You just cannot feel it the way you do when you’re standing amongst those towering Redwood trees and the deafening silence of the endless foggy forest washes over you.

The title of this post is the sound I might make if today's trade hits its profit target, helping to offset the pain I'm feeling at the pump every time I fill up my car with gas.

I was just in California this week and paid $6.00/gallon for my rental car. Ouch!!

Today's trade is in a name that has already been a strong performer this year but is showing no signs of stopping as of yet.

JC had a great blog post out this week about zooming out. In a nutshell, he was reminding us that zooming out and looking at price action from a wider lens often makes the present murky waters look suddenly clear. It's easy to get distracted by the day-to-day price action and to look at only the last few months of daily charts and conclude that a stock or an index is in one sloppy clusterjam of price action.

But when you look at that same price action, instead with weekly or monthly candles, the more recent ones will often look like insignificant noise in an otherwise smoothly trending longer term pattern.

In the post referenced above, JC shared several current examples of instruments that look sloppy recently, but the bigger picture is still sitting pretty.

One of the stocks he mentioned is currently giving us a nice pullback to get a nice entry on.

Good morning everyone! This dispatch comes to you from deep in the northernmost reaches of Northern California, on the edge of the great Redwoods National Park.

I flew out here on Sunday morning with my oldest friend (since we were both five years old). After landing and shopping for some provisions, we got a short three-mile hike in during the afternoon/early evening to get our feet acclimated. But it was just a warm-up for the 30 miles we hope to cover today through Wednesday. Yesterday, the weather was perfect, the trail conditions were excellent, and the giant Redwoods were absolutely stunning! And we're just getting started. Hopefully, the weather continues to hold up (fingers crossed!).

Of course, I brought my laptop, and since my East Coast friend was suffering from a little jet lag, he crashed early last night. That left me some time to rip through charts in my hotel room, as one, such as me, does.

During my scanning, I couldn't help but get fully distracted by this chart of $GLD:

The ASC team, as always, threw out a bunch of actionable ideas in their most recent Mid-Monthly Conference Call. As you might expect, there's still a lot to like in the energy space. But it might have surprised you to see some bullish setups in some chinese and marijuana space names. I know it did me!

But one name in the Precious Metals sector piqued my interest and when I chatted with Steve Strazza about it this morning, he was pretty excited about it.

So what is this shiny new stock?

We don't go bottom-fishing around here often. Fighting trends is not my idea of a good time.

But every so often we'll come across a beaten-up name that has so decisively destroyed bulls that there is no fight left in them. And when all the hot money has capitulated and exited their positions, THEN it becomes a compelling idea.

One such name in the Marijuana space -- yep, that utterly annihilated sector -- has found support at a key former resistance level after a 90% pullback from all-time highs

Trading opportunities aren't limited to just U.S.-based corporations. And thanks to ADRs, we don't have to go to other foreign exchanges to exploit opportunities in different countries. These companies have tracking shares -- often with tremendous liquidity -- on our exchanges here.

One such opportunity, with a big base that is showing signs of resolving higher, recently appeared in our International Hall of Famers report last week.

Is that a dead cat bounce in the Biotech ETF $XBI that will quickly fade? Or is this week's hard pivot off the $80 level the new floor?

I don't know the definitive answer, but the bet I'm going to make is that $80 will hold at least for a few weeks. If it does and as long as $XBI doesn't overshoot on the upside from here, I think this ETF is offering us a great opportunity to sell some premium here.

So let's get into how I'd like to play it.

The move in metals, commodities, and materials was pretty rapid during the last couple of months. Given that, it's little surprise we've seen a pullback in a lot of these names over the past week or so.

One name that was recently on our Hall of Famers report rose rapidly with everyone else. And now it feels like it overshot a bit on it's pullback and it's offering a nice tactical opportunity to swoop in and steal some profits.

You might not know this about me, but I’m a “graduate” of Chicago’s famed Second City Training Center. This is the school where all of Second City’s famous improv comedy graduates got their start before they became regulars on the main stage, and then went on to Saturday Night Live and beyond.

My first apartment in Chicago was a mere one block away from the Second City theater and on my way home from my office at the Chicago Board of Trade, I’d always pass by the theater doors and see advertisements for their training program. One day, in a fit of curiosity and inspiration, I said: “why not?” With no plan, I walked in the door, found the right person with the right information, filled out a form, ran my credit card, and just like that I was signed up to begin classes when the next training started in just a couple of weeks!

It was as if a spirit had possessed me and dragged me through those doors. When I walked back outside and was hit with the typical frigid Chicago wind of early January, it suddenly hit me – I was scared! What had I done?

In light of global events, we're seeing significant market reactions all over the place. And it seems like the narrative changes on a daily basis. Now more then ever, as a Trader, is it important to turn off the news and follow price. Price doesn't lie.

One trend that has been signficant and showing no signs of stopping is the bullish breakouts we're seeing in energy, commodities, and materials.

And today's name is one of the bellwethers in the space that is beginning to breakout from a multi-year base.

The hunt for options premiums to sell continues. And with VIX showing signs that it might want to give up the 30 level for a little bit, we may have the trend of implied volatility mean-reversion beginning to become a wind in our sails.

A quick perusal of the most liquid ETFs options markets that I follow revealed a surprising sector at the top of the list: Utilities. And the recent price action suggests to me we may have seen the $XLU ETF get a bit ahead of itself, and it could be due for a little consolidation.