This is a lesson I had to learn the hard way for sure. Early in my career I used to always want to be trading the Russell 2000 or the Nasdaq and sometimes even S&P futures. Some people can do this successfully. Most cannot.

A wise Egyptian man once taught me that, If you trade the Averages, You'll Get Average Returns. This made a lot of sense to me when he first said it, because I didn't have great experiences with that strategy up until that point.

The reason I bring this up today is NOT to convince you not to trade the index ETFs or Futures. You do what you have to do! The point of this post is as a reminder that we use Technical Analysis to identify trends. These trends are in all asset classes - Stocks, Bonds, Commodities, Currencies, Interemarket relationships, Crypto and others. Once we identify the trend, then we can figure out the best way to try to profit from its theme of rising or falling prices.

We've been in the camp that US Stocks have been in a sideways range since January of 2018, over 21 months. You can call this a cyclical bear market. You can call it a sideways range. Pick your preferred nomenclature and let's move on. 

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

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?

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Saturday I spoke at the Trade Ideas Summit in San Diego, outlining our bullish case for US Equities. It was a lot of fun and you can register here to receive the presentation replay when it becomes available.

Today, JC followed up on our recent posts by confirming that new all-time highs are indeed not a characteristic of a downtrend.

In honor of the new all-time closing highs in the Russell 3000, S&P 500, and Nasdaq 100, I want to outline several stocks we want to be buying to take advantage of our bullish Equities thesis.

For those who didn't check the market today, here's the Russell 3000 making a new all-time closing high, just shy of its former intra-day high of 178. New highs are not a characteristic of a downtrend, so as long as prices are pressing above 178 our upside target is 196 in the coming months.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

...

We've done the homework. New All-time highs are NOT a characteristic of a downtrend. Go back and check for yourself. I was just listening to the great Brooklyn poet Shawn Carter who inspired the headline. It's true. This is not a bear market, by definition. So should we be looking for stocks to sell or should we be looking for stocks to buy?

Oh boy. I love when my boy JC gets fired up on an idea.

In a recent piece on copper and emerging markets, here's JC:

Have you noticed that with Tech and Software and other areas grinding sideways or lower, we’ve seen a consistent bid in Emerging Markets? ...I really think the squeeze is on.

He was a little bit more, um, verbose in an email header sending this piece to his subscribers that read:

LOL.

Well, I'm game. Let's do this.

Have you noticed that with Tech and Software and other areas grinding sideways or lower, we've seen a consistent bid in Emerging Markets? Have you looked at Brazil lately? The last thing stock market bears want to see is rotation into these serial underperformers.

I don't think this is a tiny story either. I think there is a much bigger theme going on here that would be irresponsible to ignore. First of all, let's make something clear. Copper prices and Emerging Market stocks move together. You can't argue with me on this one.

Copper doesn't move with the "economy". Copper doesn't move with the S&P500. Copper is not a "Dr." of any kind. Copper moves with Emerging Markets. Period:

If we want to know what the largest institutions in the world are doing, we have to look at the biggest stocks. If you have 100 Billion Dollars to put to work, you're not buying crypto currencies or pot stocks in Canada. The big boy sandbox is where we want to look.

My friend Todd Sohn says that your best players are supposed to score a lot of your points. The S&P500 is a cap-weighted index, which means that it owns more of the stocks performing well and less of the ones doing poorly.

We are back with another episode of The Money Game Podcast with Phil Pearlman. Today we talk about JOMO, the Joy Of Missing Out. Phil brings up a point about the amount of work that goes into today's version of Keeping up with the Joneses: Instagram, for example. People are so concerned with Missing Out (FOMO) that they're completely ignoring the joys of missing out (JOMO). Saying No gives us the ability and the time to stay focused on what is probably more important, whether it's health, family, friends, work or whatever else you're into. We see this in the market constantly, with traders chasing trades and worrying about what trades other people are in and the money other people are making. The beauty of this situation in the market is that we're guaranteed to get another opportunity. The market doesn't give us many (any?) other guarantees. The one thing we do know is that there...

This is my favorite time of the month - preparing for our Live Monthly Conference Call. It really gives me an opportunity to gather all of the evidence, put my thoughts and ideas down on paper and then explain it all in under an hour. It's all pretty awesome!

In this call we talk about the US Stock market and where it fits within the Global Market complex. Throughout this process we're also analyzing the commodities, interest rates and currency markets that apply to each country. Only then do we break things down to individual sectors and their sub industry groups to finally find the best stocks to express a bigger thesis.

We call this the top/down approach and I'm pumped to go through it all on Tuesday's Call.

Over the weekend I was going through all of the International Markets and could not help but noticed the strength popping up all over the world: Japan,...

In this Episode of Allstarcharts Weekly, Steve and I are focused on expansion of global breadth. We're seeing more and more countries around the world breaking out to new 52-week highs. This week the Global 100 Index is making new highs and now Taiwan has also joined the group with Brazil and Switzerland who were already doing so. With Sweden and Japan right there near highs as well, the breadth expansion continues, not the deterioration that the bears are preaching. It's hard to be bearish equities if the Dow Jones Industrial Average is above 27,000 and the German DAX is above its 2015 highs. Those are the key levels we're watching. But breadth is expanding, not deteriorating. That's for sure.

One week it's the Dow Jones Utility Average pulling the weight. This week it was the Dow Jones Transportation Average up over 2% while the Dow Jones Industrial Average was basically flat. It's always one of them, which is why the Dow Jones Composite Average, the combination of all of them, continues to hold up so well. Remember the DJ Composite has 65 stocks, 30 from the DJIA, 20 from the DJTA and 15 from the DJU. The Dow Jones Composite Average went out at new all-time monthly closing highs just a few weeks back. Our bet is that this uptrend continues.

Here is a weekly chart of the Dow Jones Composite. These are the types of charts we want to be buying, not selling:

These are the registration details for 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 Tuesday October 22th at 7PM ET. Here are the details for the call: