This is an intermarket world that we live in. If you think what happens in the commodities and bond market isn't directly tied with what's also happening in the stock market, you've got a lot of homework to do.

You guys who have been following around along time know that we start out every single conversation about the stock market with, "Okay, what are bonds and commodities doing". It starts there. And then we go into the asset in question.

Look at Crude Oil still crashing down to new multi-decade lows:

Throughout March we've been talking about weakness in the Rupee and the underlying trends driving it (March 3rd, 2020 and March 26, 2020).

Today we want to revisit the Rupee and talk about the pattern that's suggesting an explosive move is ahead.

Most of what you'll hear me talk about are things I've learned from other people. In some cases, they were predecessors of mine and in other cases they're buddies and colleagues. It's funny because I try to do a good job of giving credit when I can, where I remember specifically who I learned something from. You guys who have been following me for a long time know that about me. But the truth is that sometimes I simply forget where I learned it. It's just part of my arsenal and I always assumed it was there.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Every weekend we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

As this is something we do internally on a daily basis, we believe sharing it with clients will add value and help them better understand our top-down approach. We use these tables to provide insight into both relative strength and market internals.

This week we want to highlight our US Equity Index and Industry tables as they illustrate an important resumption in leadership from the market's most resilient areas.

Click on table to enlarge view.

The joke around our virtual office this morning was that the nasdaq is not just strong as an index, the stock itself really stands out!

The exchanges and "marketplaces" are really shining. The relative strength compared to many other sectors and industry groups is off the charts (see what I did there?)

Take a look at names like CME Group, Market Access and Tradeweb. These names keep popping up on our relative strength scans, especially compared to other types of "financials". But let's be serious, these are tech stocks.

This is the chart of the Nasdaq that has our attention:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Thanks to everyone for participating in this week’s Mystery Chart. The responses were pretty mixed with most wanting to do nothing for now and wait for a retest of the recent highs or lows before taking action.

While it's hard not to like this uptrend over the long-term, doing nothing in the near-term is more or less the camp we're in as well.

With that as our backdrop let's discuss why this chart is important and on our radar right now.

This is a daily line chart of the All Star Charts Custom MAGA Index, which is an equally weighted index of the four largest stocks in the US Equity Market, measured by market capitalization.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

In late February we were shorting Sugar aggressively and captured a good portion of its sharp move lower.

Now we're looking at another sweet setup in the Sugar market.

Since I've got a little positive delta building in my portfolio and I'm leaning towards the market feeling a bit overextended here, I'm adding a little negative delta in an index to help balance the risks in my portfolio a bit.

And of course, it makes the most sense to get short the weakest (in relative terms) index to express this hedge.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Today, we put out a post outlining why we are bearish on Small-Cap stocks and want to be shorting the Russell 2000 ETF (IWM). Read it here as it sets the stage for this post.

Small-caps are the weakest area of US Equities. That's why we are expressing our bearish view on stocks via the Russell 2000 as opposed to one of the large-cap indexes, all of which the Russell has severely underperformed for several years now.

In line with our top-down approach, we don't just want to short an index. We are believers that playing the averages results in average returns.

For this reason, we've drilled into the Russell 2000, looked at every single chart and picked out the weakest names we could find with clearly defined risk management levels to limit us to the smallest of losses in the case these names mean-revert higher.

Adam Koos is a portfolio manager who uses Technical Analysis to make decisions for the clients he advises. In times like these, Financial Advisors all over the world are getting asked the hard questions. In this episode, Adam talks about how Technical Analysis has helped both his decision making and the communication with the families he works for. It's really cool to see these tools helping advisors everywhere, and especially a friend who I speak to regularly about markets and other common interests, like sports and wine.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In January and February, we cautioned that we wanted to be selling stocks, raising cash and buying bonds due to bearish divergences and deteriorating market internals. At the same time, many major indexes and sectors had achieved our upside objectives and were at logical levels of potential resistance.

The Global Equity Market collapsed and the S&P 500 fell 35% soon after, blowing a hole in the long-term uptrend in most major indexes around the world.

In late March we wrote about bullish breadth divergences and the key levels of interest that made us want to err on the long-side over the near-term.

That ended up being the tradeable low we were looking for as stocks gained 30% and retraced more than half of their recent drawdown in just 15 days.

On our monthly conference call this week, we talked a lot about key levels in the most important asset classes in the world.

As promised, here's a run down of the 20 items on our checklist. I promise you the world is not ending if there are an overwhelming amount of yeses on this list.

Let's use this as a risk management gauge. I think this will help us answer the question of, How defensive should we be?

We made a spreadsheet internally for this and we'll send you regular updates and keep discussing this list as new data comes in.