Anyone who traded in the late 90's only referred to Microsoft stock as "Mister Softee." It was stupid, as many stock nicknames were, but that's what it was. And you seemingly couldn't go a day without hearing "Mister Softee is making new highs!" from summer 1998 until early 2000.
I almost have PTSD from it.
Fast forward to today. Microsoft doesn't get the same media attention today as it did back then, now being overshadowed by the Amazons, Facebooks, Googles, Apples, and Teslas, of the world. But the price action is definitely giving me flashbacks.
And the ASC research team has a gaudy 323 price target for Microsoft $MSFT over the next several months which has me interested in playing along with options.
In September we'll be starting a new Live Monthly Conference Call at the beginning each month to review the most prominent monthly candlesticks charts from across the globe.
For those unfamiliar with our process, we use Monthly Candlesticks to tune out the daily/weekly noise and focus on the long-term trends in the market. It is one of the most invaluable parts of our process, by far.
As a preview of this new conference call format, I've recorded a quick video highlighting some charts that stood out for us in July.
For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it’s a custom index or inverted, who knows!
We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.
You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?
I’ve been incredibly fortunate to become the latest intern here at All Star Charts and as a part of the role, I’ll be writing a weekly note for the blog - documenting what I’m learning about technical analysis from the perspective of an intern.
Without further adieu, let’s jump into what stuck out to me this week.
Welcome to my new Monthly show that I'm doing with my friend Josh Brown. He is one of the most widely followed Financial Advisors in the country, and someone who I've been arguing with about markets for the better part of 2 decades.
Every month I'll bring a handful of the the most important Monthly charts that stood out during my review. In our first episode, I wanted to discuss the S&P500 making new all-time highs, Transports leading the way in July, Rates hitting new all-time lows and Bitcoin starting a new breakout.
This is the chart that I think tells the July story best. The further to the left the asset is, the closer it is to a new a 52 week high. The higher up the asset, the better its performance in July. Notice Transports in the upper right: Relative weakness overall, BUT the best performer this month, followed by Emerging Markets, Gold and base metals. The lonely US Dollar down below stands out doesn't it?
This weekend we got a fresh batch of new Monthly Candlesticks. If you're not using these charts to help you identify primary trends, I think you're doing yourself a disservice. I rarely push a particular strategy or process. I usually just like to present the data, give you my conclusions, and then let you decide how, or if, you want to use it.
But for this, I don't care who you are, Monthly Charts are an invaluable tool. Even if you're a short-term trader or swing trader, we want to put all of that work into context, recognizing the major trends that are in place. Trust me, go build your own list of the most important charts and flip through them just once at the end of each month. I challenge you to start doing that every month and then come and tell me that it's not helpful. I dare you!
This week on the show I ask Howard about what Trading is going to be like in the Future. What are the hours like? How will we execute orders and on what kind of exchanges? This was really fun and something I rarely get to chat about in Public. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Every week we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories, along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the relative strength trends at play and give our outlook, as well as some of the things we're watching for in the month ahead.
With July just coming to a close, we're going to focus on that month's returns for insight into the near-term and analyze a variety of monthly charts in order to view the recent performance within the context of the underlying trends.
This week, we'll highlight the broad-based bullish performance across just about every asset class in July, as well as one of the tailwinds for this which was the weak US Dollar.
Here is our list of International Indexes. We continue to see outperformance from the US, China, and other areas of Asia such as Taiwan (which is not shown in the table, but made new all-time highs this month). The Shanghai Composite and Wilshire 5000 are outperforming their peers with significant gains over every timeframe.
Yesterday we discussed some of the potential headwinds for Crude Oil, Copper, and other risk assets.
After doing my International Chartbook review over the weekend, I wanted to share some of the things we're seeing and what it means for Equities as an asset class.
