Every few weeks I get a message from someone asking a question along the lines of "Should I enroll in the CMT Program?" As with most things, the answer is it depends on your individual situation.
While I can't offer personalized advice to everyone, I can discuss my experience and the key benefits now that I've completed the process.
This post is going to be split into two parts; one where I explain my answer to the question that prompted this post, and the other where I summarize my actual experience in the program.
Wednesday's Mystery Chart is one of my favorite right now, so thank you everyone for your feedback and participation.
I received a lot of answers, but most of you were skeptical of the breakout and wanted to see more before getting involved. A few others wanted to be long with a tight stop and few, if any, were sellers.
With that as our backdrop, let's get into it.
The actual chart was the ratio of the Insurance subsector ($IAK) relative to the S&P 500, which is breaking out to 11-month highs as momentum gets overbought for the first time in nearly 2 years.
To me this looks like a textbook trend reversal, so while there may be some backing and filling over the near-term, Insurance stocks look set to outperform over the intermediate/long-term.
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 Monday May 13th at 7PM ET. Here are the details for the call:
About eight months ago Patrick Dunuwila from The Chart Report introduced me to a new data visualization platform called Koyfin. Two month's later I met Rob, one of the co-founders, at Stocktoberfest West. He walked me through the product and what they were doing and I was sold.
A few months later we had the opportunity to invest and we jumped at it. We loved the product and the team, so it seemed like a natural fit.
Today, Koyfin is an irreplaceable tool that I use alongside Optuma as my main tools for charting and analysis.
I get a lot of questions about how I use it, so I wanted to write a post answering just that.
For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and eliminate the x and y-axes and and all labels eliminated to minimize bias. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. It can even be inverted or a custom index.
The point here is to not guess what it is, but instead to think about what you would do right now.Buy,Sell, or Do Nothing?
I couldn't help but see many of the same folks who were happy about Trump's "Trade Deal" tweets when they drove the stock market higher complaining as his tweets sent Futures lower on Sunday night and again today after the bell.
I thought this might be a good time to remind ourselves of something.
With the Chinese Internet Index closing at new 7-month highs this week, have we seen the move already, or are we just getting started?
One thing we know for sure by studying history is that stock prices trend. That's why Technical Analysis works. These tools help us identify those trends. Many academics will tell you that these consistent series of higher highs and higher lows over time are just random. The truth is you can show these charts to a 5 year old and the kid will tell you that yes, this stock is going up, or no this stock is going down. You can even argue that a trend is sideways, but that is trend recognition nonetheless.
It's very clear that markets trend, particularly stocks. They go up over time and they go down over time. A stock making new highs has a higher likelihood of continuing to make new highs vs turning around and beginning a new trend. An object in motion tends to stay in motion, is how Newton taught us. It's the same in stocks, which are driven by e-motion. (See what I did there?)
Over the last two months we've been pointing to many divergences in breadth and momentum, as well as intermarket relationships that add to the mixed near-term signals we continue to see around the globe.
Last week I compared the current environment in US Stocks to that of India's a month ago saying the stage was set, but that all these divergences needed price confirmation before they become actionable.
Canada, like a few other Major Indexes from around the globe, continues to churn around all-time highs. So which way will it resolve?
Let's go sector by sector and see what the weight of the evidence suggests, just like JC did for US Stocks.
First, let's start with the TSX Composite, which continues to hover near its 2018 highs as momentum diverges. After a ~20% rally off the December lows and the presence of a flat 200-day, it would be healthy to see some consolidation at current levels before breaking out
Sayings like these give journalists topics to write about. Pro tip: Most of the stuff you'll read is garbage.
“Sell in May and go away, and come back on St. Leger’s Day”
That's where all this Sell in May stuff came from in the first place. The inference here is that there is no point trading in the summer. All the brokers and fund managers will be out in the Hamptons working on their tans. The original saying suggests that the big boys won’t get back to business until Horse Racing season in England is over in the Fall. The British have been celebrating this day in September since the St. Leger Stakes, last leg of the English Triple Crown, was established in 1776. We Americans like to call this time of year, “Football Season”.
It's that time of the month again. This is when we take a step back, reevaluate everything we just saw the past 4 weeks or so, and come back home to the longer-term charts. Life is easier when we're not fighting big trends. While it's important for us to try and identify price levels that could act as support and resistance, this exercise is to determine whether these assets are going up, down or sideways.
Regardless of our time horizon, I think it's important to take these 30-60 minutes a month to acknowledge the bigger trends. Once this is done, then we can work our way down to weekly and daily charts for execution purposes. I say it all the time - My Monthly Candlestick Review is the most valuable 6-10 hours of work I put in each year.
