We have been pounding the table to be buying U.S. stocks and ignoring the bearish rhetoric coming from almost everyone these days. I have never seen a stock market crash where people have been this prepared for it. I get an email a day warning me about this coming historic crash. We've happily taken the other side of this nonsense and continue to believe the path of least resistance is higher, much higher in fact.

However, the market doesn't care what JC thinks and is going to do whatever the heck it wants. That's life. So ahead of any serious correction, we want to identify levels where we would start to become much more neutral towards equities. Tightening stops, being less aggressive from the buy side, owning put protection and strategies like these are most appropriate under these conditions. Today, I'm going to lay out what it's going to take for us to approach the market from a more neutral to bearish perspective:

Last week was our Members-Only Conference Call, where we discussed what we're seeing in Equities, Commodities, and Currencies. During our discussion around Equities there were two themes that came up over and over again due to their impact on the overall market's direction: weakness in the Financial Services sector and small-cap under-performance.

Given the mixed signals we continue to get from this market, I wanted to share my thoughts on these themes and get feedback on what you all are seeing out there.

This week the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) expanded the Telecom Services sector to include Consumer Discretionary and Information Technology components, with it being renamed the Communications Services sector next Friday, September 28th.

In this post I want to highlight the major changes to the sector classifications, chart the new sector (using the back-filled IXCPR Index), and then finish up with some of the components that are the most actionable. State Street, which runs the popular Sector SPDR ETFs, has created a comprehensive document on these changes that I'd encourage you to read in full to understand all the nuances surrounding these changes.

In this episode I asked my friend Ryan Detrick to come talk about the quantitative work he does as part of the technical analysis he provides for advisors at LPL Financial. I have been following his work for years and have gotten to know Ryan well during that time. I was really looking forward to this conversation and it exceeded all of my expectations. Ryan does an excellent job of using basic mathematics to debunk popular myths told to investors about the market. We discuss the impact of a rising rate environment on U.S. stocks, the Yield Curve, Stock Market Seasonality and some of the things he is currently seeing in the market. This is a can't-miss episode!

We're always focused on positioning. Stocks don't go up because of some article written by a 26 year old journalist who has never made a trade in her life. Stocks move based on positioning from institutions. When the market is caught leaning the wrong way, the unwind can create spectacular moves. This is the key to the market: positioning, not the noisy media.

As many of you know, every single day I look for risk vs reward opportunities that are skewed in our favor. We're not here to be right, we're only here to make money. There is a big difference between the two. In other words, we don't care if we get it wrong. We just want to make sure that when we are right, that we're really really right. Isolating asymmetric risk vs reward opportunities is how we do that, and I believe we do it very well.

I really don't think this market is ready for the US Dollar to collapse. We've had a monster rally in the Greenback all year and emerging markets and precious metals have felt the pain. I believe that's about to change dramatically.

The Island Reversal is a rare but important pattern that has shown up across many of India's Major Indexes this month. As a result, I want to use this post as an educational opportunity to highlight what this pattern is, as well as explain how we're interpreting it in today's market.

A few weeks ago I took a look at the Precious Metals space from the top-down for Premium Members of Allstarcharts, concluding that despite stretched sentiment there's very little evidence that suggests being long this space over the intermediate or long-term. With that said, today I want to discuss the developments in this space since then that have shifted the short-term reward/risk in favor of the bulls.

After a more than 40% year-to-date and 60% 2-year decline, we've been eyeing Tata Motors on the long side for some mean reversion. For the last two months the stock has been range-bound, but the recent breakout has shifted the reward/risk in favor of the bulls over the short-term.

This week's "Chart of The Week" is exploring the potential 20% upside in Tata Motors, however, I want to use this post to explore the rest of the Automobile Sector for potential opportunities.

I think the overwhelming theme here is that there are a lot more stocks I want to buy than stocks I want to sell. Why do we need to over complicate this?

Another thing I'm seeing is the January highs as a reference point. The question is whether or not the market will be able to surpass that former resistance, proving there is more demand than supply there, or if it's the other way around? Are there, in fact, more sellers up here than buyers? We can see this key January pivot point in most of the major indexes: S&P500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, Dow Jones Transportation Average and Russell3000. Can we get through those highs like the Small-caps, Mid-caps and Nasdaq already have?

I believe the answer is in the components. How are individual stocks reacting to those former highs? Are they breaking through resistance or running into sellers and rolling over?

For us, the big question going into the weekend was whether or not the most recent leg higher in U.S. Stocks is the beginning of something bigger, a breakout of epic proportions, or just a major whipsaw that will lead to further selling into September and October, two of the most historically volatile months of the year.

We see various crowds. On one hand, you have the bearish cult who for many reasons have fought this uptrend the whole time. Whether they just missed the last couple of years in stocks or, worse in some cases, missed the entire decade, they've been very wrong. There's even a group who wishes harm on the United States and elsewhere around the world, just because they disagree with decisions being made in D.C. They certainly don't want stocks to rise. And then you have another group, who is indifferent and is just looking for a favorable risk vs reward shorting opportunity and they think this is finally it.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

For most of this year we've been writing about the overwhelming amount of bullish evidence for US Equities, however, as part of our "weight of the evidence" approach we're always questioning our thesis (i.e. here and here).

In today's post I want to share that exercise as I perform it, outlining some current concerns and what the market would potentially look like in an environment where stocks as in the US as an asset class are falling. We're going to stick with our top-down approach and start with International Equities and inter-market relationships, then drill down into specific examples that help illustrate what we're talking about.