The biggest rallies happen in corrective or bear markets. They are nice, but often temporary. Stay nimble, my Trader friends.

— Sean McLaughlin 📈 (@chicagosean) October 16, 2018

I posted this on twitter today as the latest round of dip buyers were tripping all over themselves to buy up any and all perceived bargains being offered by Mr. Market. While the cumulative bounce for the past three trading days has been impressive, I've traded through too many corrections and bear markets to be tricked this easily into thinking the storm has fully passed.

Instead, I'm welcoming bounces like this because it more easily reveals the weakest names that are struggling to rebound. The stocks that haven't bounced or are struggling in relative terms to rise with their brethren, these are the names we want to press into on the short side. They are the ones likely to lead the carnage on the next leg down.

Next up on our target list: Intel $INTC.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Marijuana stocks have never been that HIGH on our list of areas to look at given their smaller market-cap, average trading volume, and short price history often inhibits larger players from participating in them, however, the strong performance as of late has drum up interest in the space and increased the number of stocks that meet our criteria to analyze them. This post will be a quick update on what we're seeing from a price perspective.

This past weekend was the 5th annual Traders4ACause Conference in Las Vegas. It was a lot of fun and a bunch of us helped raise money for a list of great causes. On Saturday I gave a presentation about what I'm currently seeing in the markets, including Stocks, Bonds and Currencies. Sunday I sat on a panel with Joe Fahmy and Paul Singh and we just chatted about the markets, what we're seeing out there and shared some stories about the things we've learned over the years. We recorded the conversation so here it is in full. I encourage everyone to check out the Traders4ACause site and donate even if you could not attend. I...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

This past weekend we wrote updates for our US and India subscribers, discussing stock market breadth around the globe. When I do these types of updates, we often get asked why we look at international markets both in their local currency terms AND as US-listed ETFs. Why not one or the other? In this quick post we'll walk through our thought process behind it.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

We've written a lot of content on the blog about the current market environment over the last few weeks, but we want to use this post to quickly point to two broad-based breadth measures we're watching to identify when a tradeable bottom might be in.

In addition to the updates we've done about the broader market here, here, here, and here, a lot of you have been emailing us asking for more individual trade ideas. Given that we have to be a lot more selective in this environment, I'm going to use this post to outline a number of setups on the long side. The posts linked above explain why we have a long bias.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

In July I looked at the trend and momentum readings of stock markets around the world and US Sectors and Sub-Sectors to identify the overall risk appetite for Equities. Today's update will perform the same exercise and compare the results to determine if breadth has improved, deteriorated, or stayed the same, as well as what the implications of these changes are.

In July I looked at the trend and momentum readings of stock markets around the world and India's Sectors to identify the overall risk appetite for Equities. Today's update will perform the same exercise and compare the results to determine if breadth has improved, deteriorated, or stayed the same, as well as what the implications of these changes are.

Where I live in Colorado, we received our first snowfall of the season. And it meant business. Today, we woke up to 8 inches of overnight snow and it kept falling all morning. Yesterday, it was nearly 70 degrees and sunny. It's the time of the year when seasons change quickly around here. Not unlike the markets this week.

My wife and I have both been more mindful of our diet this year, and our four year old son is growing like a beanstalk. And as the season is changing rapidly, we find ourselves scrambling through our closets looking to locate last winter's clothes, only to find most of them don't fit any of us. So, comically, we find ourselves a little ill prepared for the new winter.

This all feels very fitting as the markets most definitely and rapidly changed seasons this week. And we were still wearing a lot of last season's positions. As you can imagine, that left us pretty uncomfortable.

The good news is, with a new outlook, we find ourselves scanning what appears to be a wide open field of very tempting short positions. But with this new season, we'll have to come to battle with some new tools and strategies. Very few of the strategies that...

Since we launched Allstarcharts India in January, we've seen great traction and have gotten a lot of feedback and suggestions from our readers and subscribers. In fact, many of the ideas we've added to the platform and are currently working on have started from conversations with you all.

This is 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 Wednesday October 17th at 7PM ET. Here are the details for the call:

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

A major part of the thesis for higher prices in Canada was the breakout in Financials (and REITS) which represent roughly a third of the TSX Composite, however, over the last few weeks we've seen failed breakouts in many of these leading stocks.

In this post I'll highlight some charts identified during my Chartbook update that describe the type of environment we're in for Canadian stocks and why a more neutral stance appears appropriate. Given the correlation between equity markets around the world, I'd also encourage you to read some of our other free pieces about the US here, here, here, and here.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

After last week's move to the downside I figured there would be a lot of changes to the IBD 50, and there were, so I want to highlight the characteristics of some names that continue to hold up well.

Some of you guys have been reading my work for over a decade. But I understand there are many newer readers, so I think it's important to address what's going on here. I've been called a Permabull many times for over 2 years now, meaning that they believed I just always had a bullish bias towards stocks. The truth is that while so many were eager to pick a top during this entire rally, I was consistently bullish because the weight of the evidence pointed that way. This is no longer the case and our approach has had to adapt over the past week to a new environment.

We're fortunate to have been accurate with our risk levels. As soon as Small-caps broke 169, things got bad. There was no reason to be in them for us if we were below that in $IWM. Large-caps broke our levels early this week and things got progressively worse after our prices were breached. That is why we set them. That's the good news. The bad news is that I'm confident this is just the beginning.

I believe we are entering a period of what is, at the very least, a period of consolidation. I think we're lucky if it's another 2015...

Here is a list of stocks we want to be shorting to profit from the new bearish stock market environment we've been in this month. I believe this type of market is here to stay and here's how we can benefit:

What a week, eh?

Long trades getting blown up all over the place. Luckily for us, we'd had a good run coming into last week with opportunities to take profits in a lot of our positions. That makes the exits and adjustments that have been forced upon us the last few days a bit more palatable. In both cases, the profits and losses were taken according to our plans as laid out when we entered into the trades in the first place. Weeks like this are a good reminder of why we put trade plans together up front to begin with. When markets start getting wacky, the last thing we want to be doing is scrambling in the wind, trying to keep our heads about us as we're struggling to assemble puzzle pieces on a board that won't stay still.

The good news is, rising volatility will likely offer us some good higher probability income trades in the coming days and weeks to hopefully more than make up for this week's reality check.

Is this 2008 all over again? 1987? 1929? I doubt it.

We're not seeing any stress in credit, which is where the real problems start. In fact, some stocks and sectors are going up while others are going down. We've seen relative strength in Energy, Utilities and Consumer Staples. Remember, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a new all-time high just last week. It's easy to forget right?

So what's the problem? The problem is that we have failed breakouts in all of the major U.S. Indexes, and at the very least, it is going to take some time to resolve. The questions are: How long? and How low could we go?

The way I see it, we're either buying stocks at higher levels or we're buying them at lower ones. If this is just a shake out and we take off from here, that's fine. If we go lower, which is the higher probability, then it will take a series of positive divergences in breadth and momentum. All of the risk management levels we highlighted throughout September have been violated. That's life.

Here are the levels we have identified as the most important moving forward:

It's not just the U.S. that is breaking our important levels, stock market indexes all over the world are reacting to the volatility. Europe is flirting with dangerous areas but Brazil and Russia have bucked the trend, likely due to their exposure to Energy. Other countries like India and Tech based markets have been the ones coming off the most in the emerging group.

What else can we do with that money?

That's the question we always want to ask ourselves.

I get asked all the time, "Hey JC, I own this stock, it's down x amount and I'm not sure what to do?". Man if I had a bitcoin for every time I got asked that one.

To me the answer is very simple. If you woke up that morning and you could do anything you wanted with that money, anywhere in the world, with any asset class, is that stock what you would buy?

If the answer is no, then you know your answer. Go buy whatever you want to buy. Transaction costs are nothing these days, so the pennies on that are no excuse to sit in something costing you way more. 

Two weeks ago I laid out what it would take for us to start getting more defensive in this market and not just blindly buying any and all dips. The thesis was that if certain things happened, they would not be consistent with an environment where we want to be as aggressive, and a more neutral approach would be best. Some of these developments have taken place and the impact has been seen so far in October.

Let's take another look.

CSX has been good to us.

We've been bullish $CSX all year. And we had a successful options play this summer that recently came to a profitable conclusion. JC calls CSX "a beast!" I can't argue with that.

And low and behold, even as the overall market has hit a little bump in the road over the past week, $CSX just continues riding the rails, appearing to be in the final stages of completing a nice and tidy two-month base with eyes on a $91 price target and above.

With earnings on deck, the chairs are aligned for an opportunistic play to put elevated options volatility to work for us.

In this episode I am thrilled to have Mark Newton, Founder of Newton Advisors. Mark is one of those Technical Analysts that I have followed for many many years. His intermarket perspective and top/down approach is one of the best on The Street. He does great work on relative strength and ratio charts to really gauge the flow of money from one asset to another. His experience on both the Buy Side and Sell Side gives him a unique perspective and I've always found it helpful to pick his brain whenever I get the chance. In our conversation we discussed U.S. Stock market breadth, keeping an open mind to future outcomes, Interest Rates, Oil and Gold and how he approaches the market day in and day out. I really enjoyed recording this episode and I think you'll quickly see why. This was a good one!

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

For most of the year we've been talking about downside in Bonds and the potential effects that would have on Equities and Commodities. With rates extending their gains to start the fourth quarter, we're going to use this post to look at the structural trends in Commodities and determine which are best positioned to benefit if we start to see money rotate.