This week we're back with another Mystery Chart.

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?

For me, price is the most important technical indicator. Everything after that is just a supplement to actual price behavior. In that group of supplements is Momentum. My oscillator of choice is the RSI, or the "Relative Strength Index". I use this indicator in a variety of ways, but today I wanted to show you an easy trick to quickly identify whether momentum is in a bullish range or a bearish range:

Tyler Wood is a Managing Director at the CMT Association, the global credentialing body for the CMT designation. A Chartered Market Technician (CMT) has achieved the highest education within the discipline of Technical Analysis and is the preeminent designation for practitioners worldwide. I finished up the 3rd Level of the CMT back in 2008, just in time to help me navigate that historic period for the market. I've known Tyler for almost 10 years and can tell you first hand that he is regularly speaking with some of the best technicians in the world. I think he brings a unique perspective on the subject and thought he would be a good compliment to a lot of the other guests we've had on the podcast. In the episode we touch on the growth of Technical Analysis and the CMT since the late 60s, the role that women have always played in the field and in the organization, the international awareness we're seeing about Technicals and how social media has changed the access that younger market participants have to...

We live in a world where kids get 7th place trophies. It's embarrassing.

As my friend Phil Pearlman said in one of our recent podcast episodes, "If my kid ever gets one of those, I'll make him throw it away".  

What's wrong with taking the loss, learning to live with it, and then moving on?

In October, Dr. Brett Steenbarger shared some of his thoughts with us on visualizing yourself taking the loss, before even entering into an investment. Already going through that "pain" in your head makes the loss easier to accept in the future if/when we are wrong.

Last month I put out a post called, The Market Owes you Nothing, so we remember that indeed, the market does not owe us a single thing. Financial Advisors put that compound interest chart in front of investors like a carrot, and then investors get upset when the market is not going up. The...

You know what is not a characteristic of a downtrend? All-time highs!

Friday afternoon, the Medical Equipment Index went out at new all-time weekly closing highs relative to the S&P500. We look to relative strength as a leading or coincident indicator for stocks. This sector's behavior is no different.

There is a reason why Medical Equipment stocks look like Tech stocks and not the rest of Healthcare. They're essentially tech stocks trapped in the body of a healthcare stock. Although they are indeed in the Healthcare space, we need to recognize how they behave, the relative strength vs their peers and then treat them as their own group.

In case you missed it, Medical Equipment stocks went out yesterday at their highest weekly close relative to the S&P500 EVER. This is not evidence of a downtrend or any kind of weakness. Quite the opposite in fact:

Tuesday I posted a mystery chart and asked you all to let me know what you would do. Buy, sell, or do nothing. Many said that it looked like the long-term downtrend was intact, but that you would wait for a downside resolution from this range before acting. I agreed.

So today, I want to reveal the full chart and share why I feel it's relevant.

When you hear people talking about Dow Theory, it usually revolves around what the Dow Industrials and Transports are doing and whether they are diverging or confirming one another. I want to be perfectly clear that while this is certainly one of Charles Dow's tenets from the late 1800s, this is just one of many, and not even in the top 5, as far as I'm concerned. I encourage you to check out my post: Everything About Dow Theory.

Today, we are indeed going to focus on the behavior of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Dow Jones Transportation Average. Earlier this week we discussed the Dow Jones Composite, which includes the 15 stocks in the Dow Utility Index as well. For this conversation we're analyzing just the Industrials and Transports.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Tuesday I posted a mystery chart and asked you all to let me know what you would do. Buy, sell, or do nothing. Most of you said you'd be short or doing nothing until the range resolves lower, while only one or two of you said you'd be long with a tight stop or were waiting for an upside break.

Given how closely this chart resembles the S&P 500 or other major US Indexes, I wasn't surprised by those responses. It still feels like many people have a short bias, so continued churn at current levels or a slow grind higher could leave a lot of people left behind.

Anyway, here's the actual chart and why I feel it's relevant.

Tuesday was only one day but it felt like it may have offered us a clue. The major indices — S&P 500, NASDAQ, Dow, Russell 2000 — all experienced notable pullbacks. Perhaps the first notable pullbacks we’ve seen in at least two weeks.

Now does this mean we picked the top and we’re about to run back down towards the bottom? Of course not. What this likely signals is that we are about to set into a little choppy-churn range for the next month or two.

There are many ways to gauge the strength or weakness of the U.S. Stock Market. For us, there isn't a single "best way" to do it. The advantage we have is that we just analyze all of them. There are over 50 charts in my U.S. Stock Market Indexes workbook alone.

But today I want to focus on an interesting chart that I don't think gets the credit it deserves: The Dow Jones Composite Index. I really like how it represents all of the stocks in the 3 major Dow Jones Indexes: Industrials, Transportation and Utilities. If you want a broad measure of the most important stocks in America, I think this is it.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Last week was our first Mystery Chart and Reveal Post of 2019.

This week we're doing that same exercise with a new chart, x and y-axes and and all labels eliminated to minimize bias. As a reminder, this 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.

For those thinking "I know what that is!", I'll save you the time and say you're wrong. Instead, tell me what you would do with it right here.

Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?