It's been a month since the first Chart Summit India on April 14, 2020. I've been watching the videos and learning a lot, and encouraging everyone to do so.
We had 20 brilliant Technical Analysts get together online to raise funds to help fight COVID-19. Thousands of people logged in live, and thousands more came to watch the videos later. I have to say that the Technical Analyst community online has some of the nicest people on the internet. They shared valuable knowledge for FREE. This is stuff that's made them money, and has taken them years to learn.
To start the day we had Peter L Brandt, a legendary commodity trader. Peter lives in Arizona, and trades global markets. He's written books, runs Factor LLC, and has traded on classical chart patters in 6 decades. When he talks, I listen.
In March, the up move and subsequent retracement in Bonds was breathtaking and had the world's attention.
In April, Bonds spent most of the month "normalizing," at a newer, higher level.
Here in May, we're starting to see signs that another move to the upside is materializing. Here's a quote from JC in a recent email to All Star Chart subscribers:
If you're looking for an uptrend, it's in the bond market, NOT the stock market.
...the technical setup in Treasuries looks much better than it does for Stocks right now, over both long and short-term timeframes. TLT is trading just a few percent off all-time highs as price just broke above a confluence of resistance.
And here's the chart of relative strength between $TLT and $SPY that adds further evidence of a resumption of trend for TLT:
This week's Mystery Chart was a simple yet pivotal one... it was a ratio chart of Stocks vs Treasury Bonds.
With stocks struggling at resistance this week and Treasuries meandering beneath all-time highs, both appear to be at key inflection points.
Making things even more interesting is that the S&P 500 (SPY) relative to 20+ Year Treasury Bonds (TLT) ratio is also at a key level of interest. It is make-or-break time for these two asset classes so let's dive in and see what's going on.
Breadth divergences from earlier this year took a while to confirm, but once they did we saw considerable downside.
My Chart Summit Presentation was on how I use statistics and scans to visualize market internals for insight on breadth and relative strength. I used tables from our Weekly Momentum Reports in January and February to illustrate the clear deterioration in participation taking place at the time despite the major indexes grinding to new highs.
In this post, we’ll do a similar exercise and use stats to analyze whether breadth has been improving or deteriorating in Global Equity Markets over the past month.
In this episode of the Money Game, Phil and I talk about how Technical Analysts have an advantage in the current global environment. The fact that we're accustomed to focus on price behavior, and therefore tune out all the noise, we already have those good habits in place for a world filled with more noise than ever. I see people daily poisoning themselves with massive doses of news consumption, particularly horrible things happening all over the world. This conversation brings up some great points about taking care of your business, your family, your health and making sure that the things you can control are in order. If you don't have your own house in order, you can't help others. So if you really want to do right by the world, take care of yourself first, and then you will have the ability to help those in need.
This was a really cool comparison Phil is making about the advantages technicians...
These are the registration details for the monthly conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts.
This month’s Conference Call will be held on Monday May 18th at 7PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with all of the other calls since 2015.
Vedanta Ltd. has begun the process of a voluntary delisting of its shares from the public exchange, with the promoter group planning to buy out the remaining ~49% of non-promoter shares it doesn't currently own.
We spoke about Vedanta Ltd. in our Chart Summit India presentation last month as a stock setup we liked on the long side, so given this news, we wanted to revisit that setup and see what lessons could be taken away and applied in future situations like this one.
Normally one day of price action doesn't get our attention, but given our cautious view of stocks from a structural perspective, it's worth outlining why today's candle in the Nasdaq 100 could potentially be a big deal for stocks all around the world.
For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it’s a custom index or inverted, who knows!
We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.
You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now. Buy,Sell, or Do Nothing?
In a recent blog post, JC highlighted some bullish stocks that he can simply no longer ignore. Regardless of whether or not we feel the upside may be close to exhausting itself in the broader markets, there are some setups that are screaming for attention.
If you haven't heard by now, the Online Retail Index broke out to new all-time highs. We're not exactly seeing that from a broad-based perspective. This is not happening domestically and it's certainly not happening around the world. The rotation we're seeing among sectors and industry groups is real. Today we're going to focus specifically on online retail.
The way I see it, the question here is simple. Is the massive reversion, and return to these prior highs, "the" move? Or was that just a multi-year consolidation, and the move is just getting started?
Here's what that looks like:
Click on Charts to Zoom In
Now look at this group of retailers relative to the S&P500, which happens to be one of the strongest stock indexes on planet earth. So we're comparing it to strength, not cherry picking weak indexes:
The weight of the evidence remains mixed and suggests that there will be winners on the long side, winners on the short side, and a lot of stocks in the middle that aren't going anywhere.
An easy way to view that is through our five bull market barometers, which continue to suggest we're in a bear market. As a result, we're focused on the best opportunities on both the long and short side.
In this post, we're going to outline which area of the market we're looking to short and add several individual stock trade setups to our list of open ideas.
Let's start at the sector level. Nifty Commodities remain below the 38.2% Fibonacci Retracement of its 2020 decline at 2,635. With momentum in a bearish range and stuck below this level, then it makes sense to be erring on the short side and looking for a move back towards the lows near 2,075