There's nothing wrong with betting on the next direction of a stock, or the market in general. But let's be responsible about admitting that we're wrong, when we get it wrong.

Regardless of your strategy, whether it's technical, fundamental, economics or even if you base your analysis on the movements of the stars and the moons, it all comes down to risk management.

How good are you about admitting that you got it wrong and moving on? If you suck at it, then you're not going to do very well and you'll be gone soon. That's economic Darwinism at it's finest.

The ones who are the best at admitting they were incorrect in their assessment, and doing so the fastest, are the ones who make (and keep) the most money over time.

It's really that simple.

How do you lose weight? Eat less and workout more. Duh.

But cupcakes and pizza are delicious.

Just like admitting we're wrong is very difficult for us. It's one of the hardest things for humans to do.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

Another fresh Mystery Chart!

What we do here is take a chart that's captured our attention and remove the x/y-axes as well as any other other labels that'd help identify it. This chart can be any security of any asset of any timeframe - on absolute or relative basis.

Maybe it's a ratio, a custom index, or maybe price is inverted. It could be all three!

The point is, when we aren't able to recognize what's in front of us, we put aside any biases we may have and scrutinize it objectively.

While you can try to guess the chart, the point is to make a decision...

So let us know what it is… Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In a further effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger Macro thesis, we recently rolled out our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."

We write a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from the watchlist.

We've already had some great trades from this universe and couldn't be happier about the early feedback.

Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.

In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.

Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy done.

What overbought conditions? We haven't even broken out yet. Take a look at what's actually going on!

After 14 years of no progress, Financials just went out at a new all-time high!

This is arguably the most important sector in the world. We don't have bull markets without Financials, at least, participating.

Just imagine them emerging as a leadership group...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Leadership in this environment is stretching far and wide.

We're seeing a growing number of industry groups and areas not only making new highs but also outperforming and offering us more and more avenues to express our bullish thesis on stocks and risk assets in general.

Last week, we discussed Commodities and Ags.

The week before that, we dove into Chinese equities.

And for some time now, we've been vocal on SMIDs in general.

The point is, with such an overwhelming amount of leadership these days, we can be picky and place our bets on only the best of the best in each group.

In today's post, we'll explore a hot new growth industry we haven't covered in much detail yet - Autonomous Vehicles.

You have 2 choices:

1) You can complain that you don't like the rules, you don't like the people who make and enforce those rules, you don't like the people who take advantage of those rules and you can take your ball and go home. You can do that. You have that right in this country.

or

2) You can acknowledge the fact that you don't like certain rules, you may not like some of the people who make and enforce the rules, and you especially don't like some people who take advantage of those rules. But if you can't beat them, join them!

We choose #2. Because this is nothing new. We figured this out decades ago.

Welcome to the market.

Enjoy!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

As JC pointed out the other day, this week we saw the most amount of new 52-week highs in the history of the Nasdaq.

That's right. The highest reading ever. That's bullish.

We've also witnessed another very encouraging development in market internals of late.

Let's talk about it...

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Two ETFs tracking the same sector, industry, or niche area can yield significantly different outcomes.

We see it all the time.

I'll share a few examples, along with a short discussion of what I've taken away from it all.

These are the registration details for our live monthly conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

This month’s Conference Call will be held on Tuesday February 16th at 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.

Here are the details for Tuesday night:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small, to mid, to large, and ultimately to mega-cap status (over $200B).

Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B) they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.

But the scan doesn’t just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Dividend aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street. These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to longer-term minded shareholders.

As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.

Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That’s why we’re turning our attention to the future aristocrats. In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we’re curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for 5-9 years.

Introducing the Young Aristocrats. We like to say these are “stocks that pay you to make money”. Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum & relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.