Friday was a great day in my life. Not only did we get new Weekly Charts, as we normally do on Fridays, but we also got a fresh batch of Monthly Charts to analyze as well. These are all great developments for a team like ours, so driven by data. It's like a little mini-Christmas of data, for us to dive in to.

"Whenever in doubt, Zoom out", is how I learned it. The beauty of Monthly Charts is that it makes it impossible to ignore the primary trends. And that's what this is all about.

I like taking notes when I'm doing my chart reviews, Monthly's or otherwise. Here are a few things that stood out:

First of all, the Nasdaq Composite went out at new all-time highs, US 10yr Treasury Bond Futures went out at new all-time highs, and Gold & Silver went out at new multi-year highs.

My question here is, Who's NOT making money in this environment?

Also on the new all-time monthly closing high list:

Earlier this month we outlined the "Five Bull Market Barometers" we're watching to identify the beginning of a new bull market in stocks.

In this post, we'll update those charts without going into as much detail as to why they're important. So if you haven't read our initial post linked above, we'd encourage you to check it out.

With that said, let's jump in and see how these charts have developed since.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We write a lot about focusing on the secular leaders in each sector and industry. Whether it's online retail, medical devices, or more niche areas like data-centers or mobile payments, they tend to share a common thread of innovation and technology.

Biotech fits this theme and has become an emerging leader, making new all-time highs for the first time in almost five years. It's been one of the top-performing subsectors off the lows and one of the first to reclaim its year-to-date highs.

In this post, we're going to drill into the space and highlight one of its strongest areas... Genomics.

This is a special weekend. The close on Friday marks the end of the day, week and month. That means we have a fresh batch of weekly AND monthly charts waiting for us. This process provides a lot of information because, by stepping back, it forces us to identify the direction of the primary trend.

In the meantime, a few shorter-term charts caught my attention. Both have been horrendous laggards in this market: Regional Banks and Industrials. My question here is whether or not we're seeing a changing of the guard?

Here are Regional Banks relative to the S&P500 putting in what appears like a fairly clean double bottom. Momentum putting in a bullish divergence is a nice touch:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Sentiment has not been good for Chinese Equities with a handful of recent sanctions adding to the general uncertainty around China-US relations. For the most part, we're seeing this reflected in price as the Shanghai Composite and iShares China Large-Cap ETF (FXI) are trading at multi-month lows relative to the S&P 500.

Interestingly enough, the area being hit hardest with negative headlines is one of the few bright spots in China's market right now... Technology and Internet stocks.

In this post, we take a look at the improving relative strength from this group and offer trade ideas in some of its leading stocks.

Here is the ratio chart of the Kraneweb Chinese Internet ETF (KWEB) vs the S&P 500 (SPY) which we've been writing about since November.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

Price resolved...

The market remains a hot mess where we're preferring market-neutral trades, however, some absolute trades are appropriate when the reward/risk is skewed heavily in our favor.

We outlined some favorable longs and shorts earlier today.

Another way of skewing the reward/risk in our favor is by looking for "big bases."

The way we learned it is the bigger the base, the higher in space and this is certainly a big base. And the reason we like looking for base breakouts in this environment is two-fold.

First off, big bases take time to form because they are caused by steady institutional accumulation. Mom and pop investors aren’t the ones creating this type of pattern, so we know that there’s underlying demand that will support prices if they do move lower.

Because prices have memory and the base has taken a significant period of time to build, there’s likely been more trading at each price level...

We remain in an environment where there are stocks going up, stocks going down, and many stocks doing a whole lot of nothing.

We're being very selective before putting money to work and just reiterated a few short setups in the Financial Services Sector.

In this post, we're focused on stocks exhibiting specific conditions that create a reward/risk opportunity that is ridiculously skewed in our favor.

In late April we highlighted the relative weakness in the Nifty Financial Services Index and highlighted several individual stocks that stood out as leaders and laggards.

One of our six charts to watch this week is the Nifty Bank Index, so today we want to look at two stocks showing symptoms of the underlying problem in the sector.

Bharti Airtel is in the news this week as its parent company Bharti Telecom decides to sell $1bn in stock to retire debt.

We highlighted Bharti Airtel ahead of its breakout in early May and spoke about the relative strength in Telecom stocks last week.

In this post we're going to outline why the weakness created by this news likely presents a long-term buying opportunity in the stock.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

For the week ended Friday, May 22, 2020:

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

This week’s main theme is risk-on action from beaten-down areas which we'll highlight in our US Index and Factor ETF tables, below.

We're putting a lot of emphasis on risk-appetite measures right now in order to provide insight into how the recent rangebound activity in Equity and Bond markets is likely to resolve itself.

The most basic way to assess risk-tolerance is to compare the performance of risk-on vs risk-off assets. As such, this post will focus on how the offensive vs defensive areas of various markets are acting right now.

Click table to enlarge view.

This week we saw some more mean-reversion in the laggards in our US Index ETF table. The most risk-on areas such as Transports (DJT) and the Mid/Small/Micro-Cap segments have been long-term underperformers, yet...

We've been using our "Five Bull Market Barometers" to measure the long-term health of the market and remain in the camp that risk in Equities remains elevated.

In this post, we're going to outline several charts we think will set the tone for the broader market through the rest of the quarter.

First, and most importantly, is the Nifty Bank Index which made new relative lows this week. On an absolute basis, prices are nearing their March lows of 16,100 after failing to reclaim their 2015-2016 highs in April.

Click on chart to enlarge view. 

What we're watching is how prices react to those March lows. Is there any meaningful demand at that level? or does the trap door open and we see a quick move towards 13,500?

A lot of longs are using those lows as a stop or point of reference for their positions...not just in the Nifty Bank Index, but in most indices/stocks that bottomed around the same time. And if the largest sector of...

Why does Technical Analysis work? Because markets trend. No one can argue that. I don't care who you are. And what do we do as technicians? We look for trends!

I was recently a guest on the Trends With Benefits show. It's the perfect name for a podcast about the stock market, especially when you invite someone like myself, who is constantly looking to benefit from underlying trends in the market.

In this conversation, we talk about our Top/Down approach to the stock market. Ed asks me about why we were selling stocks and buying bonds weeks before the stock market crashed. So I tried to explain the things we saw, both from a breadth deterioration standpoint and all the intermarket relationships that had been pointing to...