Many people are surprised that we are back to where things first fell apart for the S&P500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average last year. We had a severe correction in Q4, and now prices have climbed back to where this all got started. At this point, nothing surprises me anymore. Those who are still "shocked" by anything probably haven't been doing this very long....

The question we find ourselves asking this week is simple: Are these major US Stock Market Indexes going to fail up here, like they did in October, or will they break out and rip to levels never seen before?

One of my good college buddies always busts my chops because he thinks it's ridiculous that look at charts all day. Today he calls me about some other stuff, but randomly asked what was my favorite chart. I'm like, "...of all time or right now?". He said right now, what's my favorite chart?

It got me thinking. But my first reaction was the SPX/CRB chart. This is one of the most fascinating situations in the world today.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

I saw a couple tweets yesterday about FAANG stocks and their "lack of participation" in the market's four month rally and just don't get it.

First it was a problem when the largest stocks in the S&P 500 were leading. Now it's a problem that most aren't hitting all-time highs with the S&P 500.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

April 10th we looked for a bounce in Healthcare Providers and were early, so several of our trades were quickly stopped out and others didn't trigger at all. Medical Devices were the last subsector standing and once they were hit, we thought that Healthcare was likely close to a short-term bottom.

Given the extreme oversold readings we were seeing in our work (like percentage of XLV components hitting oversold conditions last week) and the subsequent bounce to start this week, I want to outline five names showing relative strength in the space that could benefit from continued mean-reversion in the sector.

More importantly, they offer well-defined risk and a reward/risk that's skewed in our favor.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Rotation into Energy stocks continues to pick up. While the reward/risk opportunities at the sector/subsector ETF level aren't great, there are several attractive setups within individual stocks.

In this post I'm going to point out seven names within Energy ETFs XLE, XOP, OIH, AMLP, CRAK, and FCG with extremely well-defined risk and skewed reward/risk at current levels.

Half are buying strength (higher probability, but lower reward/risk) and the others are mean-reversion setups (lower probability, but higher reward/risk). Pick your poison.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

I just finished writing a free post for All Star Charts India following up on where we've been over the last two months and what this last week of price action means for Indian stocks in the near-term.

As I was writing up the post I noticed a lot of similarities between US Stocks today and where India was just a few weeks ago.

I'm going to summarize the key points, but I'd encourage you to read that post in full so you can really see what I'm talking about below.

Anyway, let's just jump into it.

In our April 10th Chart of The Week, as well as in our Member's Only Conference Call on Thursday, we presented the question of whether the bearish momentum divergences we were seeing in the Nifty 50 and other major indexes would matter or if the market would brush them off and continue higher.

Well, we finally got our answer.

What inflation?

This seems to be the talk of the town these days.

Interest rates all over the world made new lows last month and have since then tried to start a recovery. We're seeing this across the developed world in the U.S., Germany, UK and Japan, among others. Meanwhile, journalists at Bloomberg Business Week decided to put a dead dinosaur on the cover of the latest issue asking, "Is Inflation Dead?"

During yesterday's Members-Only Conference Call we outlined a trade idea that falls into the low probability, high reward/risk category.

In this post I want to share that idea and explain why it's the type of trade we'll take every day of the week.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

I received a ton of great responses via Twitter and email for this week's Mystery Chart, so thank you for that.

A lot of you were leaning towards the short side, with different approaches and stops. Some were neutral, but very few of you were leaning long.

A big theme for me this year has been the US Dollar and how it will impact stocks as an asset class. The thought process coming into 2019 was simple. The Dollar had rallied throughout 2018 to reach some pretty critical levels. The idea was that if the Dollar was going to rip right through there, it was more than likely happening in an environment where investors would be fleeing to safety. That's the type of market where stocks are selling off. The opposite of that argument was that if the Dollar was not breaking out, that stocks would likely be doing well, both in the U.S. and more importantly globally.