From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Every few weeks I get a message from someone asking a question along the lines of "Should I enroll in the CMT Program?" As with most things, the answer is it depends on your individual situation.

While I can't offer personalized advice to everyone, I can discuss my experience and the key benefits now that I've completed the process.

This post is going to be split into two parts; one where I explain my answer to the question that prompted this post, and the other where I summarize my actual experience in the program.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Wednesday's Mystery Chart is one of my favorite right now, so thank you everyone for your feedback and participation.

I received a lot of answers, but most of you were skeptical of the breakout and wanted to see more before getting involved. A few others wanted to be long with a tight stop and few, if any, were sellers.

With that as our backdrop, let's get into it.

The actual chart was the ratio of the Insurance subsector ($IAK) relative to the S&P 500, which is breaking out to 11-month highs as momentum gets overbought for the first time in nearly 2 years.

To me this looks like a textbook trend reversal, so while there may be some backing and filling over the near-term, Insurance stocks look set to outperform over the intermediate/long-term.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

The relative strength is also...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

The trend is your friend...but what do we do if there is no trend?

Paul Ciana and I go way back to 2006 when him and I were studying for the CMT exams together. Today, Paul is the Chief FICC Technical Strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research. In English, that means everything outside of equities. It's nice to see your friends succeed and watching him crush it is definitely one for the good guys.

In this podcast episode we dive deep into the FX world where Paul walks us through 3 important currency pairs that all stock market investors should follow. We talk about Crude Oil and Gold and other precious metals. The Dollar is a key focus right now for both Paul and me, so we get into what the implications are for stocks and other assets around the world.

I really enjoyed this conversation. It could have gone on for hours...

Markets are getting a little shaky. No real surprise. We've had a huge run to start the year and it's only natural for there to be givebacks along the way. Markets don't go straight up forever. That's not how this works.

That said, there are some sectors and stocks that are still holding up relatively well that require our attention. If this turns out to be another garden variety correction then we're going to want to be long names that are standing strong now -- these are likely to be the next leaders. The All Star Charts team published a bullish piece on the Energy sector a couple weeks ago, and not much has changed since. The sector and its stocks have pretty much gone sideways. One stock that has my attention now is:

These are the registration details for the monthly conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts. In this call we will discuss the global market environment and how to profit from it. As always, this will include Stocks, Interest Rates, Commodities and Currencies. The video of the call will be archived in the members section to re-watch any time and the PDF of the charts will be made available as well.

This month’s Conference Call will be held on Monday May 13th at 7PM ET. Here are the details for the call:

About eight months ago Patrick Dunuwila from The Chart Report introduced me to a new data visualization platform called Koyfin. Two month's later I met Rob, one of the co-founders, at Stocktoberfest West. He walked me through the product and what they were doing and I was sold.

A few months later we had the opportunity to invest and we jumped at it. We loved the product and the team, so it seemed like a natural fit.

Today, Koyfin is an irreplaceable tool that I use alongside Optuma as my main tools for charting and analysis.

I get a lot of questions about how I use it, so I wanted to write a post answering just that.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and eliminate the x and y-axes and and all labels eliminated to minimize bias. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. It can even be inverted or a custom index.

The point here is to not guess what it is, but instead to think about what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

Today we sit down with the newest (and likely youngest) Chartered Market Technician (CMT) Mr. Tom Bruni live from Washington Square Park in New York City. The CMT program is different today than what it was 12-13 years ago when I first went through it. I wanted to pick Tom's brain about his experience and what advice he has for others thinking about sitting for the exams.

If you've read headlines or watched Shout! TV over the past 36 hours, you've likely been tempted to make some bad decisions with your portfolio. Panic is like sex to the financial media -- panic sells. Panic attracts eyeballs, gets you glued in, which translates to advertiser dollars. That's all financial media cares about. Not you, and certainly not your portfolio.

Our choice as market speculators is to either succumb to the artificial stress placed upon markets to make decisions not in our best long-term interest, or to take the other side of the nonsense, trusting in cooler heads and price action to lead the way. You know which path we take here...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

I couldn't help but see many of the same folks who were happy about Trump's "Trade Deal" tweets when they drove the stock market higher complaining as his tweets sent Futures lower on Sunday night and again today after the bell.

I thought this might be a good time to remind ourselves of something.

The Pharma Sector had been improving from a structural perspective, but recent action and breadth may be suggesting the space is falling ill again.

Let's examine the evidence.

With the Chinese Internet Index closing at new 7-month highs this week, have we seen the move already, or are we just getting started?

One thing we know for sure by studying history is that stock prices trend. That's why Technical Analysis works. These tools help us identify those trends. Many academics will tell you that these consistent series of higher highs and higher lows over time are just random. The truth is you can show these charts to a 5 year old and the kid will tell you that yes, this stock is going up, or no this stock is going down. You can even argue that a trend is sideways, but that is trend recognition nonetheless.

It's very clear that markets trend, particularly stocks. They go up over time and they go down over time. A stock making new highs has a higher likelihood of continuing to make new highs vs turning around and beginning a new trend. An object in motion tends to stay in motion, is how Newton taught us. It's the same in stocks, which are driven by e-motion. (See what I did there?)

With Chinese Internet holding above key levels, I think the path of least resistance is over 10% higher for the Index. If $KWEB is above 49,...

Back in March I climbed up the Highlands Bowl in Aspen for the first time. 4 or 5 turns in my skis popped off and I tumbled down the entire mountain. About 100 yards later, there I was hanging off the side of the cliff waiting for ski patrol to come help me. Miraculously, it took them less than 20 minutes to find us and bring my skis down to where I was. Even though I was perfectly fine, my body overreacted to the existential risks and the primitive parts of my brain took over the duties of what other parts usually handle. I've had similar feelings before after experiencing a bad loss in the market. Phil does an amazing job in this one in explaining the differences and similarities between these two types of risk and why my body reacted the way it did.

It's one thing to find a great opportunity to make a directional bet. But sometimes it can be be quite a challenge to express that trade with options due to a thin market of options for that stock. This would make a multi-legged options spread especially hard to pull off. In situations like these, I like to leverage the simplicity of naked options.

Last month price finally confirmed many of the divergences we were seeing under the surface and stocks began to correct...yet the Nifty 50 is sitting just shy of its all-time high.

What gives?