A lot of the jokes in my community begin and end with gold bugs. I can't think of any group that has been so wrong for so long. You could have literally been in anything else the past 8 years and made money. It's all good though. What goes around comes around. Gold will have its day again, and I think it could be around the corner.

The US Dollar has been a big focus of ours all year (see here, here and here). The implications of the US Dollar's next move will be felt worldwide. I've been in the camp that the US Dollar Index below 98 is positive for stocks and that a drop in the Dollar will most likely coincide with a rotation into emerging markets and european equities. While the Dollar has remained below 98, it’s been more of a sideways range that anything else. But we may have just seen the beginning of this collapse.

Here's...

Markets appear to want to move higher. Regardless of our opinions, regardless of our fears, the only thing worth paying attention to is Price. And prices look higher. Heading into summer, let's go on a trip.

One thing we know about all-time highs is that they are not evidence of a downtrend. With near-record pessimism towards stocks recently, it's fun to watch the ones that are breaking out to all-time highs. I'm not really sure what everyone is so angry about, these long bases are slowly breaking out one by one, not breaking down.

Something we've been pointing to all along is that for the major indexes to take out resistance from the past 17 months, we need to see an expansion in participation to the upside. In other words, more stocks, sectors and indexes breaking out to all-time highs. This expansion of breadth is likely to lead and/or coincide with an upside resolution in indexes like the S&P500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, Global100 Index and many others. 

It feels good to be back in the office listening to music and ripping through charts! This is something I love to do. The past few weeks were incredible. I met with a lot of smart people throughout Europe and I'm back with new perspective, new ideas and new friends. You can't put a price tag on those experiences. When people ask me what they should invest in, I can't help but answer with: yourself. Invest in what you're doing and what you're learning. I believe this to be true now more than ever.

The first thing that stands out to me as I work through my chartbooks is how little things have changed, particularly in the stock market. The S&P500 is up 1% since I left a month ago. The rangebound market we've been in continues to progress in the same direction, or lack thereof. In mid-May I pointed to the Global 100 as the chart that tells the stock story the best. At that point, we were looking at a 3rd test of overhead...

One of the things I harp on here is Best Practices. When I make it a habit to engage in best practices in terms of both strategy selection and position management, I put myself in position to win more often.

Best Practices skews odds in my favor. It keeps me from swimming upstream against volatility currents. It keeps my risk lower. It helps with P/L consistency. And it helps me stick with trades that still have time to play out.

Selling Half is a position management best practice I employ most often when trading straight long calls and long puts. I like to sell half of my position when the value of the position has doubled. It can be very tempting to want to hold your entire position if it quickly runs up and you find yourself sitting on tremendous profits thanks to the leverage inherent in long options. And certainly, there are times when I wished I would've just sat on my hands as I watched a stock continue to fly higher. But for every one of those times I wish I had, there are easily five other times I'm glad I hadn't.

You see, when a position doubles or triples (or more) in size, the open profits are nice -- but they are distracting. What??? Hear me...