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.

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.

Here are the details for Monday:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Last month we wrote about the lackluster move from some of the cyclical sectors off of their March lows, particularly Industrials and Financials.

We continue to see weakness out of these areas over both long and short-term timeframes as Financials are pressing on all-time lows relative to the S&P 500 and Industrials just made a fresh relative 20-year low.

In this post, we'll take a look at these underperforming areas and share some trade ideas to express our bearish thesis.

First, let's take a look at the long-term relative weakness we just mentioned.

Click chart to enlarge view.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

New Mystery Chart!

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?

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

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

For the week ended Friday, May 8, 2020:

Every weekend we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Many of the relative trends in stocks that have been in place for a long time have come into question recently as they're showing signs of maturing due in part to the change in leadership we wrote about this week.

In this post, we'll highlight two structural intermarket themes that have remained robust throughout this tumultuous time for equity markets.

The first relative trend that hasn't slowed down at all is the relentless outperformance of the US over the rest of the world. Our first table shows the Wilshire 5000 (DWC) dominating every Global Index over just about every timeframe, from this week to the trailing year.

Click table to enlarge view.

If you know me by now, you know how much I enjoy all things Japanese. For me, it's the best cuisine on earth. The architecture in Japan is spectacular. I can't take the smile off my face whenever I'm there. If you can believe this, I even passed the Japanese Sake Advisor Exam earlier this year.

There's a blog post I've been working on for a while I titled, "Investing Like a Sumo Wrestler". But that's a conversation for another day.

This week I was watching the new documentary, "The Delicacy", about sea urchins and the divers who harvest them. Uni, which is what the Japanese call the edible part inside the sea urchins, is one of my favorite snacks in the world. You can get good ones from Hokkaido, Santa Barbara and off the coast of South America.

The documentary was awesome, even if you don't like to eat Uni, like my wife. She also loves visiting Japan, but she'll tell you she prefers Italy or Greece. I'm torn.

The headline you'll hear is that unemployment rates are soaring to unprecedented levels. What I always like to point out is that stocks crashed months ago, collectively factoring in just that. Stocks are a discounting mechanism. It's more obvious today than ever, and I think this is a nice reminder. 

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

There aren't too many charts in the Equity Markets breaking out of decade-long bases on an absolute basis right now...

This week's Mystery Chart was though, and the vast majority of you were buying it against former resistance turned support. We agree with that approach and would be doing the same here.

Thanks as always to all those who participated, but there's just one catch...

The chart was inverted! This means most of you were actually selling the breakdown in the Latin America 40 ETF (ILF).

When we talk about "Precious Metals", it can mean a lot of things. You've got the metals like Gold and Silver, which are behave very differently at times, and you have the stocks with all sorts of market capitalizations. There are a lot of ways to describe the precious metals space, so let's get into a little bit of that today.

Here is a chart of what this group looks like this year. Notice the outperformance from the Gold Miners Index Fund, almost twice the performance of the metal itself. The little guys and silver in general didn't perform nearly as well:

Click on Charts to Zoom In

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

There has been a lot of talk about the potential implications on the broader market if Mega-Cap Growth and Technology stocks were to lose their leadership. Since they have been responsible for driving much of the gains in the major averages for years now... we can only ask ourselves, who might pick up the slack if and when this happens?

In this post, we're going to analyze the top-performing areas today and compare them to their strength before the market crashed in February and March.

We'll also look at the leaders from back then and see how they're holding up today.

This will give us an idea of whether we really are undergoing a change in leadership or not, and if so, where the new areas of strength are.