I don't like how many oversold conditions have been hit in the major indexes and most sectors. I've tried my best to point out the stocks showing both relative strength and momentum. But there are an awful lot of charts I see where oversold conditions in momentum is a problem. So the question becomes, is a retest of the lows necessary for stocks to continue higher?

The market is never going to give us what we want. We have to take what the market gives us. Play the hand we're given, not the hand we wish we had. What worked in one market environment is not going to work in another. That's why all those filters fail so frequently, because you're trying to take something from the market instead of taking what it is giving us.

This week, a spike in volatility caused forced selling in stock index vehicles that trickled down to ETFs and individual stocks. We did not see any stress, however, in credit markets, currencies or any of the commodities like Crude Oil or Gold. This is further evidence that we want to continue be buyers of weakness, like we have been throughout all of last year and most of 2016. There will be periods where we want to be sellers of strength, but I don't believe that is the correct approach today.

If you've been following along, I try and go out of my way to discuss risk management techniques, tools and signals when the market gives them to us. Whenever I lay out a thesis, I like to talk about what the market should look like in the case that we are correct, while at the same time outlining what the environment would look like if we are wrong. The idea is to picture both scenarios and as the data comes in, try to identify which outcome we're in as quickly as possible.

It's not a secret that Emerging Markets were the big loser for a long time. Since peaking during the 2010-2011 time period, the underformance of anything EM, Mining and Natural Resources has been clear to all of us. Gold was a terrible investment, mining stocks, stocks in mining countries and others in that area had been the worst place to put your money for many years. Although still not in a full fledged parabolic rise, we've seen what appears like a healthy completion of a massive base.

To me, this is suggesting that the outperformance we've been seeing out of Emerging Markets is just getting started. The initial burst from early 2016 was more of a beta trade. This is when stocks as an asset class bottomed and the worst of the worst, emerging markets in this case, outperformed because of their higher volatility nature and the simple fact that, the harder the pounce, the more violent the bounce. We've gone nowhere the past 15 months since that initial thrust of the lows. Until now.

It's amazing how many people in this world completely ignore monthly charts. I never understood it. It's an exercise that only needs to be done once a month. It's not like eating healthy or working out that you have to do it consistently for it to work. This is 30 minutes per month! 30 minutes! 12 times a year. That's 6 hours of work that will be the most important and productive 6 hours of the entire year. Even if you have a short-term time horizon, all of these shorter-term trends come within the context of a much larger structural picture.

This weekend was our second annual Chart Summit. I still can't believe all the amazing feedback that continues to come in after this event. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart, both the presenters and the audience members. I didn't think we could make something even better than the original, but I think based on the responses, we may have actually pulled it off. Wow!

Our video production folks are hard at work putting all the videos together, but I've picked out the ones I did so I can share with all of you as soon as possible. The rest will be out this week.

It's hard to ignore a sector that is breaking out to new highs, especially when it's something that it hasn't done in a long time. Biotechnology has been a laggard for years. If we've wanted to be in healthcare, it certainly has not been in Biotech or Pharma, it's been Medical Equipment stocks. But it's 2018 and times are changing.

Today we're looking at breakouts in both the Equally-weighted Biotechnology Fund $XBI and the Cap-weighted Biotechnology Fund $IBB. Because of the very different composition of the two sector funds, we want to make sure to always watch the behavior of both. The $XBI tells a better story of the sector because it is not dominated by the big names like Amgen or Gilead. But at the same time, we're not going to just throw out the fact that $AMZN is a huge component of the Discretionary space, for example. So I think it's important to always keep an eye on both the cap-weighted and equally-weighted sector indexes.

Biotechnology has not been something you've been hearing me pound the table about for a long time. I was a huge Biotech bull in 2015, but this has not been something we've wanted to be involved with much since. The biggest reason is for the dramatic under-performance. The winning areas have been in Technology, Industrials and Financials, not Biotechnology. If we've wanted to be in healthcare at all it's been in the Medical Device and Equipment stocks, not Pharma or Biotech.

It's 2018 now and things are changing; sectors are rotating. We're seeing strength in Energy, Materials and really just Natural Resources in general. Canada and Australia breaking out finally points to strength in that area as well.

Today we're going to talk specifically about Biotechnology and if/where we want to be involved. 

When you rip through 5000 charts a week you start to notice a few things. One thing that has caught my attention recently is the fact that there stocks just now breaking out of 20 year bases. These aren't some irrelevant micro-cap companies either, these are stocks that are literally representing some of the most important industries in America. It's hard to ignore these developments and I think it points to further strength in the U.S. Stock Market this year.

Stocks aren't breaking down from major tops. We saw so much of that happening throughout 2007 that it became almost impossible not to be short equities in 2008. Today we are still seeing the exact opposite: breakouts from major bases, multi-decade bases in some cases. Today I'm going to point out 3 very important stocks that are just now coming out of historic consolidations.

All-time highs across the board in Small-caps these days. Some are in shock. I personally just don't understand why stocks that are in uptrends going up is anything outside of perfectly normal? I would argue that any other result is what we should consider unusual. If the market teaches us one thing is that trends are much more likely to continue than to completely reverse.

In September I put out a post about small-caps breaking out of year long bases. If you recall, at the time, the sentiment around the market was about how high stocks were and how they could not go much further. My argument at that point was the exact opposite. Small-cap stocks had done nothing for an entire year. To suggest the stock market was too stretched was irresponsible, in my opinion. Not only did we want to be long stocks, we wanted to be "very aggressively long" equities.

It's a new year and we're already starting to see brand new trends emerging. One area that I've preferred to stay away from for a long time has been the energy and natural resource space, which just so happen to be 2 of my favorite areas to be long heading into 2018. Today I want to point out the major reversal in Natural Gas stocks that I believe will catch many by surprise as we progress into the first quarter and likely beyond.