From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

I received a ton of great responses via Twitter and email for this week's Mystery Chart, so thank you for that.

A lot of you were leaning towards the short side, with different approaches and stops. Some were neutral, but very few of you were leaning long.

I Don't Know!

See how easy that was?

How come we never hear that in the financial media? Because they don't want you to say that.

How come we never hear that from the sell side analysts? Because the institutional customer will just call another desk at another firm with an analyst that has an opinion, and they will get the trade and earn the commission.

As humans, we're just not built for this. It's hard to admit you're wrong and move on. But the truth is that none of us know what is going to happen next, especially in the market. So to admit that you don't know is not only okay, but is actually fact.

In this video I sit down with David Keller to discuss this very topic:

A stock of interest for us recently impressed investors with their latest earnings report, sending shares on a gap higher at the open today. Now that the event is out of the way, options pricing (in terms of volatility) has collapsed, giving us a great opportunity to participate in what looks like an ideal candidate for a "Post Earnings Drift" move higher.

A big theme for me this year has been the US Dollar and how it will impact stocks as an asset class. The thought process coming into 2019 was simple. The Dollar had rallied throughout 2018 to reach some pretty critical levels. The idea was that if the Dollar was going to rip right through there, it was more than likely happening in an environment where investors would be fleeing to safety. That's the type of market where stocks are selling off. The opposite of that argument was that if the Dollar was not breaking out, that stocks would likely be doing well, both in the U.S. and more importantly globally.

Fast forward to today, almost 1/3 of the way done with the year, and stock have performed very well. In fact, as Piper Jaffray's Craig Johnson mentioned in this week's podcast, stocks have had an incredible entire year already, just a few...

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?

This week on the podcast we have the pleasure of chatting with Craig Johnson, Chief Market Technician at Piper Jaffray. I've known Craig for a long time and love the work that he puts out. During the day he speaks to buy side clients all over the world. As a past president of the CMT Association, he has surrounded himself with some of the best minds in the history of technical analysis. His perspective based on who he speaks to and his experiences throughout his career make me want to listen when he has something to say. In this conversation we discuss the rest of the year for U.S. stocks and sectors. There's a part in this episode that focuses on breadth and what we're both looking for moving forward. Inflation, or lack thereof, is something he's watching, so we talk about Gold, Oil and other inflationary factors that could impact stocks and bonds. We covered a lot. I really enjoyed this one!

Most of the Equally-Weighted Sector Indexes we track have been underperforming their Cap-Weighted counterparts for the last 16 months, however, we are starting to see some signs that a counter-trend rally in three sectors may be brewing.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Last week's Mystery Chart Reveal focused on the rotation into Industrial stocks. In this post I'm going to point out five names in this sector from the S&P 1500 with extremely well-defined risk and skewed reward/risk at current levels.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is my favorite of all of the stock market indexes. You know how many charts we look at every week at our shop. So with the plethora of price data that comes across my desk, it's really the simplicity of the 30 stocks that represent the Dow that makes me appreciate the index for what it is.

The Dow is a price weighted index where the highest priced stocks represent a larger portion of the index. For this reason, it often gets dismissed in favor of the "broader-based", market cap-weighted S&P500. Some like myself even prefer the Russell3000 index which is really representative of the US Stock market. Funny enough, as different as these indexes may be on paper, that's why they play the game. Here are what the 3 of these things look like in real life. 

Most regular readers of mine know I'm a big fan of the "hundred-dollar-roll."

If you aren't familiar with this phenomenon, essentially, its the tendency for traders and investors to be distracted by a big, sexy, (but ultimately meaningless) round number. And 100 is the most common of the big round numbers that captures the fancy of speculators new and old.

And this phenomenon isn't new. In fact, in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (the greatest trading book ever written, in my opinion), Jesse Livermore mentions trading stocks as they approach 100, 200, or 300 was one of his favorite strategies as he could very often count on that large number acting as a magnet for buy orders -- which then eventually results in further follow thru for several more points beyond the round number. "There is nothing new on Wall Street," he'd say.

This is all on my mind as a household name and a darling of Wall Street and Main Street emerges from a nice bounce off its 50-day moving average and approaches 100...

Most of the stocks we've liked on the long side have either been stopped out or are well on their way to our upside objectives. While we're remaining patient and think many stocks still need to consolidate their recent gains, that doesn't mean there aren't any opportunities right now.

In this post I'm going to outline the stocks where our risk is very well-defined and reward/risk is skewed in our favor. That way we can participate in any potential upside if the market continues higher, while also limiting our downside should it succumb to the near-term weakness we've been on watch for.

Have you ever heard that the stock market cannot go higher on an absolute basis if the Equally-Weighted S&P 500 is underperforming its Cap-Weighted counterpart. Does this measure of market breadth have any predictive value with respect to market direction? What about the sectors themselves? Well, we've run the numbers and the answer is no!

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

I received a ton of great responses via Twitter and email for this week's Mystery Chart, so thank you for that.

A lot of you were leaning toward the long side, with different approaches and stops. Some were neutral, but none of you were getting short.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

A few weeks ago I wrote about Shippers, Casinos, and some Construction/HomeBuilding Related stocks being some of the weakest areas of the market. About the message the market would be sending if those stocks couldn't see downside follow-through after breaking down.

So let's check in on those "shitty" stocks.