Iron Condors & 1 ATR Strategies | Trading A Smaller Account

all right good morning everyone welcome to trading a smaller account my name is barb armstrong and i inadvertently had put my mute on and had to figure out how to uh take that off i know that we've got a crowd ready to rock and roll this morning i have so much i want to cover with you it's going to be an exciting class we are going to talk about iron condors we are going to talk about a short-term trading strategy called the one atr strategy we are going to look at what's been happening with the trades in our account so buckle up we got a lot of stuff to cover and 45 minutes to be together this morning as we roll into the weekend so stay tuned lots of great stuff about to come your way [Music] [Music] i want to thank everyone for joining us this morning we have quite a crew already in the house so uh good morning to vijay and to ap and to krista and mia and srinivas and john and amy and akeem and red solo cup and larry and michael and john and and denise and and the rest of the gang thank you all for being here and thank you for being so participatory you know it really makes it a fun class for ken and i to do together i've got ken rose with me in the chat he brings a wealth of experience with him and so please take advantage of it if you have questions between ken and i we have answers so if you're with us live you can type your questions into the chat and and we'll do our best to answer those if you are watching this as you know many many do in the archives you can type your question in in the comment section on youtube i do look at those on the daily and and i'll get back to you as quickly as i can this weekend i'm hiking in bryce canyon so i won't be looking at them till monday so little patience please um and the other way to get a hold of us is via twitter and so you can see on uh the powerpoint my twitter handle uh at the armstrong underscore tda kansas at k rose underscore tda can post great content as the market is opening every day and if you aren't tapping into that my friends it is free all i can say is you are missing out so um that's that let's get through our important information so we can get out to the platform okay so know that in this class everything we cover is for education and informational purposes only it's not to be construed as investment advice to trade any particular strategy yeah you know on any particular stock in any particular way so just be aware of that um the next thing is that options are not suitable for all investors so you want to make sure that you're aware of that also um so this content is um yeah and if you're new to td ameritrade you have to apply for option trading privileges so you've got to be aware of that also because you can do whatever you like in your paper money account um you know but when it comes to your live account um sometimes approvals are required so and i've had clients get caught out on that where they've practiced the strategy for months or you know weeks and and then they go to take their first small position in their live account and it won't go through yeah so anyway just be aware of that also know if you trade futures you've got to apply for privileges option trading or futures trading privileges also yeah so that's that um know that all investing involves risk including the risk of loss know that short options can be assigned at any time um regardless of whether they're in the money or net or not if they're in the money obviously there's a higher opportunity and know that with paper money you'll never be assigned early so that's one of the differences between the platform but by and large it looks like smells like feels like you're trading in a live account but there are some some differences and that's one of them okay so what are we going to talk about today well we're going to go out and have a look at the markets and one of the things i love about ken being here is that he is very good about giving us an idea because he looks at the futures ahead of time and gives us a flavor for what might be happening when that bell rings so uh i appreciate that so we'll see it looks like things are going to be up i wanted to go over our iron condor trade examples and we're going to layer on another trade today example trade on the russell index we're going to look at managing our trades because knowing when to get in is half the battle but it's only half the battle right like we have to understand how to manage things so if we have anyone that is brand new don't think like oh dang it she's going to cover stuff that she's talked about in other classes i'll put in links to our playlist so that you can go back and see when we put those trades on and understand those concepts um but you know if you just keep coming back we layer new trades on every day as we manage the trades we have it's an important concept so even if you weren't with us when we put them on that's important and of course we always add some new example trades to this portfolio okay so let's get out to the platform now with this class we currently have um oh geez almost 27 000 in this class we started at 20 000. so this was yesterday's class um you might want to check out this active portfolio management class on thursdays at four o'clock eastern um next week we're going to talk about stocks that pay a dividend we're going to be looking for stocks that are less expensive and and you'll see why in a minute um because we have a couple of positions in our account um that our stock positions we don't have a lot um we tend to trade a lot of options in this class but we started at the beginning of the year with twenty thousand our rule was we could risk two percent which if you have a million dollar account you may not be willing to risk two percent you may say okay the most i want to risk on any one trade is half of one percent or a third of one percent or whatever your number is but this is a smaller account and so sometimes we have to be willing to take a larger risk percentage watch if percentage-wise in order to be able to place trades and then as the account grows we might leave that number the same we might until it hits 30 000 you know bump it up a little bit but then as the account continues to grow we might knock that down from two percent to one percent okay this is just a way of looking at um you know a small account when we're starting out and then our max position size is 5 000 and you may be saying like back the truck up like that's 25 of this account like what is wrong with you well if we want to be able to buy a stock you know that means we could buy a stock up to 50 in value so that knocks like all the tesla's and the apples and the microsoft's like all those big boys are knocked out right from the beginning if you wanted to buy a hundred now you could buy a few shares you know and there's nothing wrong with just buying a few shares also um you know but we can do that this is an intermediate level class so i'm assuming that you understand what a short put vertical is what a short call vertical is what an iron condor is if you don't please type it into the chat when i go to place that trade and i'll take 10 15 seconds and give you a quick overview but then we can put a link up in the corner um to a getting started with options which i teach on tuesday for that account we started this account at the beginning of january and so if we wanted to see kind of how we're doing so far this year we could just take our 26 642 and divide it by 20 000. oops we need missing a zero you know we're up at 33 percent you know so we're beating you know the major indices you know and we get to meet once a week for 45 minutes so you know don't throw our shoulders out for patting ourselves on the back but you know it's so far this is doing well now this could change this could change right and this is just an example portfolio so somebody's saying you don't know what a short put in an iron condor is okay so we're going to go and and and talk about that so let's start with an iron condor and we're well actually let's start by reviewing the markets let's do things in some semblance of order so the s p 500 when we look at a one year chart definitely up trending right right everybody could not they're red yes and but you know we've seen this kind of pull back and to you know what i was looking for i did a guest spot on a schwab show the other day and he said like what would you be looking for and this was two days ago on wednesday and i said well i'd be looking for it to cross this diagonal resistance line for starters you know it's now above the um 10-day moving average but and and it's above the 100 but it's still below the 30. but you know this is certainly a

step in the right direction but if we change our drawing tool and we kind of look at how much has this pulled back like when it pulled back the very bottom it was down less than six percent 5.8 and then you come up here to where we are today down three percent and so a technician might say you know we've had this incredibly some might say ridiculously bullish market for the last year a six percent pullback is a healthy pullback within the context of an uptrend now you know others might say well we're not out of the woods yet and and you know again um this is all in how we interpret it so some might say hey don't get too comfortable about saying this is just a temporary pullback which it may be we've got a lot going on right we got the debt ceiling there's now you know a buy until the beginning of december we've got you know tapering coming up we have the fiscal stimulus winding down so is there going to be less demand we've got all these global supply constraints that are you know hurting a lot of companies and some might say you know what i spy with my little eye i still see this as you know i've got a high i've got a lower high and i've got still i got three lower highs in a row buttercup and so you know this isn't necessarily a break out the band you know time necessarily yet you know so some might say you know i'm i'm cautiously optimistic well what does that mean well some might not be sure so and here's our market forecast line compliments of mr rose um and you can get this script from um i i've pinned it to the top of my twitter feed and it's also i'm sure ken will get it to you too if you reach out to ken but this is now actually up trending within this 20 to 80 zone and so from a market forecast momentum line perspective it would say that you would have permission to technically take a bullish trade now would there still be bearish opportunities out there in all likelihood yes okay so that's the nasdaq or the s p 500 we come to the nasdaq what are we seeing well we're seeing something incredibly similar right so we had this pullback this pullback may have been a little more dramatic you know where the other one was six this one was eight and a half from stem to stern and where are we today five so still it was a little more aggressive pullback and tech stocks really got hit and this is obviously a very tech heavy index and like you know news flash not above this diagonal resistance line yet and you might say well you do yours that way maybe i'd rather draw mine this way and i think it is passing you know and so technical analysis there is some you know it's in the eye of the beholder but you know when i kind of look at that i think okay it's approaching but it's not quite over that hump yet um if we look at the dow and we have an iron condor trade on the dow um and so you can see you know over the last year it's had this really nice run up until it hit you know the beginning of may and then it kind of started behaving in a range-bound fashion and broke out and we thought oh okay well you know maybe this is going to move because this was about a 17 range so the expectation was that it might move 17 to the upside and it ended up being a bit of an elongated fake out because it's now back in this range again and some might look at this and say but it could be interesting because i spy with my little eye a potential double bottom here but it's not broken out above the top yet so and it didn't come down quite as far as it had these other times so maybe this range is getting a little bit bit narrower so but the net of it is it's still trading within this range and then we come to the russell okay let's go to the vix first because the russell will be the scene of our first trade review and first trade um so when we come to the vix you know it's you know we've seen some over the last couple of years really high numbers volatility wise like higher than we've almost ever seen historically um when covid first hit but then it's been cut it's come down and it's been kind of hanging out in this 15 to 20 neighborhood and you know with every once in a while it'll kind of peak its head come out you know pop above like it's on a trampoline for a couple of days and then it's back into the 15 to 20 range well it hung out above this 20 range for longer than it has since it hit that range back in march the last couple of weeks but it's now back in the 15 to 20 neighborhood so what does that say well it says that collectively the markets may be saying like there isn't going to be a financial catastrophic you know world market financial market crash because the debt ceiling you know um isn't being extended and and all of that we've got to pass at least till december and we're you know um you know confidence is returning to the land again yeah so there we go um so that's where that is so if we come to the russell and you see these lines here so again trending it hit this range and it has been bouncing back and forth in this range since really the end of january and so here's someone said they didn't know what an iron condor is so what an iron condor is is a credit spread sandwich so what is a credit spread and and i'm you know this is an intermediate level class i'm not going to spend a lot of time on it but the idea here is that we are selling a call above where we think that this index will go in the next 20 to 30 days and then in order to define our risk because we don't own the index and when we sell a call we're agreeing to sell something that we don't own which carries unlimited risk we're gonna buy a call above that and this is called a short call vertical okay and i will put a link in the top corner here if you don't know what a short call vertical is that's at 7 48 and then i will also put in a link in this top corner to what a short put vertical is um and so because really then what we're doing at the bottom is we're going to sell a put which says we're willing to buy the stock at this price or buy this index at this price um and there's no way we could do that we could afford to do that um with this class and so we're going to buy a put below it and as long as this the russell stays above the strike we sold down here and below the strike we sold up here we are happy campers and so what we've been doing is adding a new trade each week and we've done this for the last four weeks in a row now the first two trades have been closed out so and we we put in when we entered the trade we put in an order to close out the trade when we had 80 percent of our max gain and so this is what we have done so if we come to the monitor tab and these green lines here show where our sold strikes are okay and what we're seeing is it seems to be kind of coiling up a bit it's hanging out in the middle here and so some might say you know they're seeing a bit of a pennant pattern within this range and it'll be interesting to see which way it breaks so if we come to the monitor tab and where are my iron condors right here so we have these two iron condors on the russell we had one that was due to expire in seven days and that we ended up out of for a profit and we had another one that would have been expiring today so we have one that's due in 14 days we sold it for 290. it's now worth a dollar 30. so really on

this one well if i take a dollar 30 and divide it by 290 you know we've got 55 percent of our max gain so but we what we could do in here is put in an exit to say hey when this is when we've got 80 of our max gain we would like to shut this down so when this is worth you know about 60 cents so i've just taken 29 times two or you might say 50 you know 55 cents when it's worth about 55 cents i want to shut it down so if we come here right click create a closing order for the whole thing to just buy the whole thing back to shut it down when it's worth about 55 cents want to close it out now if we get to next friday and it's worth 60 cents you know might we close it out absolutely or even 70 cents yes we might choose to do that so but we're saying you know it we could be out golfing and this thing could close close itself down but that's what happened with the last two and it's interesting because our strikes are basically the same yet we got paid 290 for this one and 540 for this one what was the difference volatility and so you know how do we put this trade on two days ago when the vix was higher you know two days ago when the vix was up here we likely would have been paid more for it but we weren't meeting two days ago so we're meeting today so what we're going to do is come out here to and and just replicate this trade and so we're going to come to our strikes are the 2120 put so it was 21 oh 2140 and 2130 and then this is 23.45 and 23 23.40 on the calls oh you know what the other one is bigger because it's a 10 wide spread 23.40

let me close this there we go 40 and 45 and uh 2140 and 21.35 okay so we're going to come to the trade tab we're going to go out about 25 days here so that's now november 3rd because we have one expiring let me just look at my calendar we had one oh we're on the vix i thought it was going to be october 28th or 9th okay so october 29th let me come here so we have won it expiring in 14 days okay 21 days i've already put this on well let's go out one more week 28 days so now we're another week out 21 days so we're going to come out to 28 days okay so we're coming out to november 5th and yep that's a friday so we're going to come down and we need more strikes because we're out pretty far here so we're doing 21 30 and this time we have to do a 10 wide strike so we're risking a little more we can definitely only do one contract here but 2130 i've put this one on in another class and we're coming to iron condor so it'll say 2130 um oh i actually i wanted to do 21.40 21.40 selling iron condor 2140 and 2130 and then these this looks super high but that's just because these calls are really high the calls we wanted to be 23.40

and we'll go 23.50 23.40 that's 22.40

23 40 and 23.50 now sometimes some people will that they aren't looking at this technically they might just be looking at this from a a debit perspective uh did i not want november i did thank you for that november 5th okay so we're going to get 60 cents more for being in this an additional week so our strikes 2340 2350 and then 2140 2130 we're getting 415 so if we get 415 and we're risking how much well the difference between the strikes which is 10 dollars minus the 4 410 so if we look at that and we say okay we're risking six hundred dollars so this is a little high for us but if we're going to do this on a weekly basis there will be times when we're gonna have to do a ten dollar wide strike so we're just going to manage it and actually given the current oh you see it just closed one of these out our october 22nd um because we put that exit in there okay so i'm i want to get at least four dollars for this so i'm going to put in a four dollar credit we want to get four dollars so we'll put in four dollars and just see if it will fill yeah um well let's see somebody's saying that we can do uh well let's just go with this so if this fills and i'll manipulate this uh a little later because there are other things that we do want to cover today iron condor put this in here there we go so we can see um if we come back here now that we have a zero on this one that was out 28 days um and we're we're out of that one and usually you'd expect to be filled on this one here that's kind of interesting that that were we've exited that position so if we come and we look at this and we put in the russell rut so we close that one out for 50 cents we got in it for 290 so we were ahead by two dollars and forty cents or two hundred and forty dollars and while that may not seem like a lot two hundred and forty dollars on a 20 000 account you know is is just over one percent so if you could do that on a weekly basis now are there going to be times when you have losing trades yes and mia is saying we did have an option of a five dollar wide spread on that and the the reason that i went ahead with the 10 is because at 26 865 and you know we could risk five uh 540 dollars okay so we got filled on that one so we'll just see but you know some might say i am never going to stretch that rule at all i'm not going to go over by a dime and and the recommendation is that you are better to be conservative okay so coming back to our monitor tab [Music] so we now have one expiring in 14 days one expiring in 28 days uh 21 days and one expiring in 28 days so we've got three layered on okay okay so that's that one so let's close the iron condors i just wanted to bring this up because we haven't talked about this in a very long time but we do have two dividend stocks in our portfolio and when you have a smaller account sometimes you might be saying well you know this is a a realty company and and you know there are special risks in inherent to trading reits so we want to be aware of that this is trading at sixteen 16 we bought this back at the beginning of the year we're up almost 20 on that and this also has a dividend yield of 7.9 so let's just say it decides it's going to go a whole lot of nowhere for the rest of the year we still would have with the dividend yield a 26 return on our investment now another one of the differences between a live account and a paper money account is that those dividends don't get deposited to our paper money balance but they are a real contribution and in fact um i heard a number from a guy named david bach who wrote the latte factor and 13 other books you know that about 30 30 to 35 of the profits coming out of the market overall are in the form of dividends so you know don't sneeze your nose at that um you know even if you are a young person or especially as a young person starting out some people when they hit retirement dividends become more appealing because they're looking for additional income you know day to day but if we come and we look at the chart on this abr you know we bought this um you know back in february and you know it's just continued to march nicely up that hill so you want to adjust the stop so if there's a major market correction that you don't end up giving back all those gains but the other one was ipg an ipg we bought more recently and it's been kind of going sideways but is also you know still we're seeing higher lows here and higher highs we're approaching earnings and if you're not familiar with a company if you come to the analyze tab and fundamentals this is part of the communication sector you know global advertising and marketing company okay so that's that one the other one i wanted to point out and we're not going to go through all of them but we've i wanted to point out apps so we have a long call vertical on apps and i think we put this on in this class last week so this is a bullish trade after a six percent pullback in the market but we have 42 days still to go on that okay so um you know we need to exercise some patients um but it's and i've put this on the chart we want it to end up above both the 75 and the 80s strike and that's how we'll see our max gain we're quite a ways from that right now but it's certainly heading in the right direction and why did we place this trade well what we saw here when we looked at this i don't know why this just randomly shows up sometimes what we saw was a double bottom pattern do you guys see that we had this double bottom here and then it broke out came back to retest and i think we got in like really right about here um and so now it's sitting pretty close to that and so you know what some people might do is you know they might be waiting for another pullback and then say you know i'm gonna do that again you know so um totally up to you but that's that's that trade we also did a short trade it expires next friday on netflix and i think i put that on in another class where we did a long call vertical at 6 30 and 6 35 and it expires next friday and so as long as it's above 635 and right now it's at 640. so if it just stays there we'll have our max gain on that one yep okay so someone asked me about a one atr trade and how they can find out about that and just even what is a one atr trade so you can do this either bullishly or bearishly with long calls or long puts i talk about this a lot in our long call class or long options class on mondays at noon so if you really want to kind of hone your skills in that join us on mondays at noon for long options i do often put on trades that would qualify for this account okay so if we look at this and we said so somebody asked about that and i thought okay well you know maybe we could find a good candidate and when we come and we look at sectors you know and i find the easiest easiest way to do that is if we come in here sorry it time me out if we come in here and you go to sectors and industries and then over to the monitor tab and this isn't an area i never used to come over here and then they made me teach a class on it and you know what there's so much good information i never go a day without coming over to this platform for research purposes i'm telling you there's just a ton of great stuff so if you were like me and you never came over here join brent moore's on thursday afternoons at four o'clock eastern um there's a there's a lot of great stuff so when we come and we look at the last three months you know what sector's been the strongest well financials energy technology when we look at the last 30 days energy and financials are still strong energy up 20 in the last 30 days like that's crazy so you know it's wrong well let's not call it crazy let's call it robust so if we're trying to look for candidates in you know that we might do a short term trading strategy on if we look at something like a cvx now ideally we would have wanted to catch this yesterday and the idea you know because you want to see it pulling back and then you know that close above the high of the the low day so yesterday would have been our entry but the idea of the one atr strategy i'm going to change my studies here we're going to get rid of our more market forecast and we're going to add one atr so what does one atr tell us what it tells us is how much we might expect this stock to move in the course of a day and from top to bottom and it's a little more complex than that if you click the the little question mark beside the study it'll give you a more complete definition but it's saying well it could move you know up to two dollars and 20 cents over the last 14 days that's been the average we've seen a lot of movement with this stock um but if we expected it to go up just another two dollars and 20 cents then we'd get out that would be our target so cvx you know moved up a little more than we were expecting how about exxon mobil so exxon mobil is a little closer because with these you really want to catch it you really want to have your entries timing appropriate so if we look at this again another diagonal breakout what's our atr on this one about a dollar a dollar 48 and so we can see how much has it moved up today a dollar seventeen so this is a short-term trading strategy um it's another dating type strategy where we're just going to we're going to get in we're going to buy a call where our expectation is for it to go up and for us to be out in the next couple of days so when we look at this and we say okay xom where how far are we going to come out if we only expect to be in in a couple of days why wouldn't we buy the 15th it'll be cheaper you're right it would and you know we don't need 40 strikes here we're going to be buying the you know at the money strike but if we come out a little bit further now you know this is one where if we look at the weeklies and we give this 28 days you know we still have only an eight cent spread because we've got volume being traded here and our time decay is three cents a day if we come out to november that because this is a buying strategy so time decay is important um you know we're seeing here our bid ask spread is you know a little bit tighter it's you know four cents as opposed to 10 cents and time decay is going to be chipping away less so we're paying you know a dollar 88 for the 6250 well let's look at the 60 where is it trading one 62 if we just look at the 60 for point of comparison this one's three this one's 325. you know and it's already you know this one they both already have some intrinsic value the advantage of a weekly is sometimes you can get these one dollar options you know something closer to where your your stock is trading but if we bought this you know we bought the 60 option or the 6250 either one will accomplish our goal and just say okay i'm going to how much could we lose in this trade we could lose the entire amount so how many of these can we do if we do the 60 we can do one if we do the 6250 we could do two and so if we said okay let's do the 6250 we are going to buy and we're buying custom with an oco bracket uh the atr if we're being bearish we're going to read it exactly the same way now when we come here what we're going to do is come out to our chart and here's a one atr example and we're going to use xom so our atr on this is 1.48 and so our target is going to be the current price 61.92

plus 1.48 boy our time goes so fast 61.92 plus 1.48 63.40 6340 and our stop would be and some might just say i'm gonna make it today's low um minus one atr if it goes the other way i want out so if i say okay today's low is 61.25

uh 612 today is uh sorry 6120 yep 61.25 minus 1.48 equals i could type today 61.25 uh dollar 48 59.77

and so we're going to go ahead and put that in we're going to make both of these market orders and good till canceled because we're basing our exit and our target on the price of the stock not on the price of the option and we want i always put my target in first so that's 63.40 i find that i'm less likely to make a mistake and the our other one here we're going to come in xom oh sorry if it's less than 59.77 we want to take what's left of our premium and go home and when we come to confirm and send you know we want to exit if it when it hits 6340 or as i like to jokingly say tongue-in-cheek it you know in the highly unlikely event that we're wrong it comes down and hits 59.77 we want to exit but you know is there a chance it can come down and hit that yes and we could go to the table and and look at what the odds are of it hitting that and you know and every trade has the opportunity to to be a losing trade but we can't lose more than what we paid to get into the trade it says our max profit is infinite but we are putting a cap on our profit and often this will return you know 15 to 30 percent but you know when it works but we're only going to be in this trade for a short time frame so if you're looking at that and saying well i got a 20 return and i was in it for you know two days three days five days the problem happens if it starts to go sideways and it doesn't hit your target or your stop then time decay starts eating our lunch and so this is not a set it and forget it so we're going to put that in our long call bucket and this is a one atr example and so we're going to put that in our notes yeah and we got filled so guys i can't believe it we are out of time and you know i don't know if it goes fast for you but it goes awfully quickly for me so i guess that is a teaser for the kind of stuff we do in the long options class on monday and and the thing with long options is they are directional you have to be right on direction and you know that can be a tough thing to do so when you do this shorter term strategy you're saying like i don't have to be right on direction for the next six months i just need to be right on direction for the next few days you know just for the next few days so we're going to start doing more of those in this class and if you come on monday when we're appropriately position sized i will put some of those trades into this portfolio like we still have sixteen thousand dollars sitting on the sidelines guys and you know we've you know earned a return of 33 you know so we've got money to invest so next week i want to wrap your head around an interesting strategy on on either short verticals or iron condors so you will not want to miss it so next friday um please join us for that and so did we do what we said we were going to do well yeah we had a quick look at the markets and i try and keep that kind of brief because i know that you guys tend to look at the markets daily we did our iron condor example we looked at managing a couple of trades and we placed a couple of new example trades an iron condor and a one atr strategy so um that is a wrap for today so guys so delighted that you joined me today again just in closing know that everything we do in this class is for education informational purposes only not to be construed as a recommendation on the part of td ameritrade all myself um also know that options carry certain risks with them it behooves us to understand what they are before we get in and know that there are transaction costs associated with trading options 65 cents per leg per contract so you know it's 65 cents per times four if we're doing one iron condor um also know that you know we put in a target we put in a stop it's not a guarantee and in fact in that class we've had it work out both you know to our favor um you know if something gapped up and and you know we got out at an even nicer price but it also if it gaps down on the stop side we could get out at a less attractive price and and thank you for all the well wishes i'll post some pictures on twitter this weekend can you tell i'm wall to walgreen um i'm heading off to hike with a friend in bryce canyon and um it's been on my bucket list for a decade so it's time i got there i've hit most of the other national parks but um yeah this is my weekend for bryce so yeah so guys take care have an absolutely awesome weekend up next will be um i know ken is so on top of things and thank you ken for being here it will be oh getting started with stock investing which is at noon eastern um at 10 o'clock mountain time with connie hill and she is fabulous you'll want to take advantage of that so with that that's a wrap take care everyone have an amazing weekend and i will see you on monday in um yeah long options so that that's it bye for now

2021-10-11 07:57

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