If there is one thing that has worked since October, it's cash. I feel like people are afraid of that word. Like you're doing something wrong for raising some (or a lot of) cash. Do you think it makes sense to always be fully invested? I don't.
I look at everything through the lens of potential opportunity cost. What else could we be doing with that money? In liquid markets, sometimes it's treasury bonds, other times it's gold, and of course all of the market neutral pair trades and options strategies to profit from sideways markets.
Cash is an investment too. Why do you always have to be all in? You want to think 50 years out? Go ahead. We're only concerned about the next couple of quarters. We'll worry about next year, next year. And 50 years from now? I only hope to be around sipping wine and ripping through charts. We'll see...
My presentation at Chart Summit 2019 focused on market breadth and how we like to keep our process of looking at the subject pretty simple.
While that presentation covered a number of our methods of measuring the market's internals, in this post I want to share some stats we pulled this weekend that help provide some valuable context around the market's rally from the December 24th lows.
The table below outlines the major US Indexes we cover with performance stats from important inflection points: The January 2018 highs, the September 2018 peak, and the December 24th low.
We also have some additional stats listed like percentage below 52-week high and above 52-week low, days since those events occurred, whether the daily RSI reading is in a bullish or bearish range, and whether prices are above their 200-day moving average.
The columns we want to pay attention to for now are the first three.
One of the cool things about Chart Summit this year was that we were all surrounded by smart experienced market participants with unique styles and approaches to the market. When you have a collection of talent like this, I think it's wise to pull them off to the side and pick their brains. In this conversation, I ask Todd Gordon about Fibonacci Analysis and why he uses it so frequently. Some people like to dismiss it, and that's fine. If I didn't think it helped, trust me, I wouldn't use it. But it's been helping me every day for well over a decade. I really enjoyed this chat with Todd and I'm thrilled that he was able to be a part of the first ever live Chart Summit in Breckenridge, CO.
Throughout the week we've been raising some caution flags about the short-term direction of Equities (here, here, and here).
Now that we're seeing some downside follow-through for the first time since December, I wanted to outline a few more potential short setups on an absolute and relative basis.
First let's start with why I'm looking at these sub-sectors to begin with.
The S&P Midcap 400 Consumer Discretionary is one of the cleanest charts I see out there on an absolute basis, with well-defined risk and reward/risk clearly skewed in favor of the bulls. Since there's no ETF to trade this, I had to look through some of the individual components to see how we can best express this thesis in the market.
On this podcast episode, we're flipping the script a bit. I was invited to come on the DailyFX Podcast hosted by Tyler Yell last week, and I wanted to share that audio with you here today. In this conversation, we discuss the recent Chart Summit in Breckenridge, CO, how and why I started Allstarcharts.com and what trends I'm currently seeing in the market. One thing we also talked about was the benefits of journaling and writing ideas down on paper. I really enjoyed this conversation so thank you Tyler Yell and DailyFX for inviting me on.
Last night I was working on an International and Fixed Income ETF Report that went out to our Institutional Clients, but I wanted to highlight an important theme that I saw during my analysis.
In our February Conference Call we outlined the potential for some mean reversion in the Mid and Smallcap Indexes as they retested their 2018 lows, as well as the implications of a breadth and momentum improvement if we got it. We did, so let's take a look and see what it means.
In our "Free Chart of The Week" we posed the question whether or not we've seen the end of the Mid/Small-Cap decline and presented some compelling breadth and momentum data.
This post is going to outline all of the "big picture" evidence that's currently available and explain why we think the foundation has been laid for stocks to carve out a long-term bottom.
The market has been a one way street since late December, but last week we put our our first short ideas since Q4 and Sunday night we wrote about some near-term risks that were emerging. Things are potentially changing.
At the Index level things are a hot mess, but under the surface we're starting to see traffic moving in both directions...and that's perfectly normal! Stocks go up and down. Let's take a look at what we're seeing.
People love bragging about their best trades and how much money they made from them. I think it adds much more value to talk about the worst trade I ever put on and share the lessons I learned with all of you. This is one mistake that I will never forget and I have been a better investor because of it!
