On Monday afternoon I was over at the Bloomberg West headquarters as a guest on their 4PM show "What'd You miss?". This is a show that I've appeared on a few times from New York, so it was cool to see their San Francisco studios. My take is that the snack bar in the Lexington Avenue building in New York is much better, but the view of the Bay in San Francisco beats the view of Queens, NY all day. So we'll chalk it up as a tie.

Anyway, last time I was on the show back in December we wanted to be short the S&P500, Apple and Emerging Markets while simultaneously buying U.S. Treasury Bonds. This has worked out very well over the past month as stocks got crushed to start the year, so we couldn't be happier. Now, although a lot of our tactical downside targets were hit last week, including Apple into the low 90s, structurally things have actually gotten worse. I think going forward, any strength should be used as an opportunity to sell into and much lower prices are coming for U.S. Stocks.

Here is the full interview:

This is a great piece from the desk of Tom Bruni @brunicharting

***

Approaching Tactical Bounces In Bear Markets

After doing my U.S. Sector and Sub-sector review, there is a common theme that I think is worth pointing out. Structurally speaking, things now look worse. The best sectors that had been leading are now breaking uptrend lines and key support. Meanwhile, the laggards continue to hit new lows. Things overall have worsened in my opinion.

Now, short-term we had a lot of very specific downside targets in most sectors coming into the new year. Over the past week and a half I would say that a very large majority of the S&P sectors and sub-sectors have now achieved those downside objectives. I've been very clear about where we want to cover tactical shorts and they are detailed in the Chartbook. Going forward we would much rather be sellers of strength, than buyers of dips, although there are a few exceptions.

Here are my notes from this week's sector review:

Going country by country all over the world is one of the best tools that we have as market participants. The value that I’ve gotten over the years from looking at the behavior of all of the countries, instead of just the U.S. is a huge factor in why I am such a top/down weight-of-the-evidence guy. There are signs of strength and weakness that we see from international markets that might not be so obvious in the S&P500, for example.

Last September, I promise you that the reason I got bullish tactically was not because of what I was seeing in the United States, but what was happening around the world. There were simply too many bullish momentum divergences and downside objective achieved internationally to ignore. Something was up, and in fact, the counter-trend rally that we got in the U.S. actually exceeded my expectations.

Momentum is a word that is used an awful lot when referring to public markets. You hear people talk about "momentum stocks" or how they're seeing a "momentum shift". Unfortunately most of these references are just off-the-cuff sort of statements that don't have any real meaning. "It sounds good, so let's use it", kind of mentality. For me, it is a really important part of my process and I want to explain to you how I use it.

First of all, I am not an oscillator junkie. We all know that guy with 27 indicators plotted beneath the price on a chart. That isn't me. I like my charts clean. It's amazing how much you can see when you just get everything else the hell out of the way. My preference is a 14-period Relative Strength Index, otherwise known as RSI. Don't confuse this with

The big level that I've been watching in S&Ps has been that 1880-1890 area representing support in August and September, which was also resistance back in early 2014. To me, this has been the big line in the sand. I see no reason to be short this market if prices are above those levels, and we're finishing up the week above it. So now what?

Structurally speaking, I don't think it changes anything bigger picture. We are still in a downtrend in U.S. Stocks as the weight-of-the-evidence suggests that we ultimately head much lower. We saw more new 52-week lows on the NYSE this week than we did at the August lows, an expansion in weakness, in other words. Financials have collapsed on a relative basis, hitting fresh multi-year lows

When we talk about leadership in the market, I think it's important to go sector by sector to see where the leaders are and where the laggards might be. To help with this study, we take a look at each of the 10 S&P Sectors and compare them to the performance of the S&P500. This Relative Strength Analysis is one of the best ways to see sector rotation and changes in market leadership.

I have just updated all of the Sector vs S&P500 charts in the ChartBook and here are some of my notes:

A big reason why I've been bearish towards the U.S. Stock Market is because I'm in the weight-of-the-evidence business and globally stocks have been getting crushed. It was only a matter of time before the selling came to the United States Index. A good example of a broken market making new lows is India's Nifty Fifty Index.

That was fun wasn't it? S&Ps lost a cool 13% since the last week of 2015. You think that's a lot? Emerging Markets lost 16% during that period. The Russell 2000 Small-cap Index lost over 17%. Micro-caps lost over 18%. 13 is nothing. And get used to it, because I think there is a lot more selling coming.

Today, we're going to focus on what the S&P500 looks like because that is what all of you keep asking me about. I like to look at stock markets from a more global perspective, taking into account what other asset classes are doing like commodities, currencies and interest rates. Remember, I'm in the weight-of-the-evidence business. I believe that in order to navigate through what is a constantly evolving global marketplace, taking the weight-of-the-evidence is the best approach. But today, we'll take a deep dive look at S&Ps on their own.

While everyone is making a big fuss about S&Ps making new lows, or Oil hitting new lows, or the amount of stocks in the NYSE hitting new lows, believe it or not, there are plenty of things making new highs. So although we've been bearish towards the U.S. Stock Market for months and could not be happier to see stocks continuing to sell off, today I want to focus on something that is making new highs.

This is a 20-year chart of Gold relative to the CRB index. This index is comprised of 19 Commodities including Crude Oil, Copper, Corn, Sugar, Gold etc. We consider the CRB to be the benchmark for the commodities markets

The Head and Shoulders experts are popping up everywhere these days. Never has there been a price pattern searched for or imagined in people's minds more than the infamous Head & Shoulders Pattern. Funny, as much as they love to talk about it and as much airtime as it gets on the TV and Internets, it's actually one of the more rare patterns driven by supply and demand. The reason it is so rare is because, by definition, it is a reversal pattern. Since markets trend, and ongoing trends tend to continue trending in their direction, by looking for a Head and Shoulders Pattern, you are doing the exact opposite of what we're trying to do here in the first place: recognize trends.

As a simple definition, a Head and Shoulders pattern, in this case, a Head and Shoulders Top, is made up of two higher highs (the "Left Shoulder" and the "Head"), followed by a lower high ("Right Shoulder"). After each of the prior higher highs, the ensuing sell-offs should find support near

It doesn't matter what this chart is. Tell me this isn't a structural breakout to kick off the New Year?

We held a free webinar this week to show off our new ChartBook and discuss how to best invest for 2016 using intermarket analysis. At All Star Charts, we use a global top/down approach in order to take the weight-of-the-evidence in Stocks, Commodities, Currencies and Interest Rates to come up with a theme. Once we have a major global theme, we will break it down to specific U.S. Sectors or Country ETFs and either buy or short individual ETFs or stocks to express our theme using strict risk management procedures

Here's a very simple shorting opportunity in a name that we all know well. This is a bear market, I've been very clear about that for months. The majority of stocks have already fallen more than 10-15% from their recent highs, and in some cases a lot more. But there are a few names that have held in there despite the major U.S. Stock Market indexes falling completely apart.

Today I want to focus on Dr Pepper Snapple $DPS, a stock that is putting in bearish momentum divergences on both weekly and daily timeframes. To me, this is a great recipe for a nice correction. If the risk vs reward is in favor of the bears

Today I want to point to a chart that a really smart friend of mine has been sending me for months. He prefers to remain nameless, you know how these sell side guys roll, so we'll just call him Mr. T. In this Chart, Mr. T has been telling me since the Fall that the Regional Banks vs REITs ratio is suggesting that U.S. Interest Rates are heading lower, specifically the U.S. 10-year yield.

On the top frame, we're looking at the Regional Bank Index ETF $KRE over the REITs Index ETF $IYR. In this case, the numerator, Regional Banks, do relatively well when the market thinks rates will rise, while the denominator, REITs, do relatively well when the market thinks that rates

From the desk of Tom Bruni @brunicharting

***

Telecom Threatening A Structural Breakdown

When I read about the Telecom sector or speak with colleagues about it, I find many people often think of it as a collection of companies with strong balance sheets, great cash flows, and shareholder friendly actions like juicy dividends and share buybacks. While that may be true in many cases, that doesn't necessarily mean that the sector can be utilized as a bond proxy to boost a portfolio's yield. As we saw in recent years with sectors exposed to high-yield, and MLPs, there's no such thing as a free lunch. In addition to that, simple math shows that Telecom hasn't been correlated with bonds (TLT) at all over the past ten years, with the correlation being 0.29, 0.19, and 0.08 over the past one year, three years, and ten years, respectively.

If you had adopted the above philosophy, stuck this sector in your portfolio and hoped for the best, you've seen that

In all markets, there are uptrends and there are downtrends. And then, of course, there are periods where there is no trend at all and it's just a mess. Ultimately these messes find away to clean themselves up and a new beautiful trend is born. This is just the evolution of markets, that by definition trend. It's our job to try and find them early in their growth, or, on the other hand, look to benefit from the downside of an aging and changing trend.

It's the sideways markets with no trend that'll get you. This is what some of us refer to as a chopfest, and is exactly what we've seen in the 10-year note yield over the past couple of

From the desk of Tom Bruni @brunicharting

***

Potentially Time To Fade The Natural Gas Rally

With Natural Gas futures up roughly 48% since the December lows, the urge to call a bottom in this asset class is quite strong. However, history tells us that the most vicious rallies occur during bear markets, which may suggest that current levels offer a decent risk/reward on the short side.

Before taking a look at price, it's important to be aware of current sentiment and seasonality data within its proper historical context. In terms of sentiment, the recent rally has allowed a number of things to occur

This year has gotten off to an awfully noisy start. When you consider that most of what we've seen in the first week of 2016 is just a continuation of ongoing trends, you would think that people would consider this to be normal. But since there is a change in calendar, people rather freak out and the noise levels are spiking for little reason. Trends typically continue, rather than reverse course. So why should a change in the calendar year make that any different? It doesn't.

I want to invite all of you this Thursday January 12, 2016 to a FREE Webinar that I'm putting on where we will all remain calm, go over the biggest ongoing themes across the global marketplace, and figure out how to continue