From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

New Mystery Chart!

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?

If you're one of these people who thinks the lows for stocks are in, which sectors would you expect to be leading the way higher? The big important groups that fell the hardest, and therefore should bounce the most? Probably.

Well, what if I told you that it's been the opposite.

The leaders off the lows are Utilities, Consumer Staples, Healthcare and REITs:

Options premiums remain elevated in this market. This continues to put me on the hunt for premium selling strategies in the most liquid ETFs.

One of the ETFs showing the highest volatility appears to be starting to settle into a range. And we can sell options very far away from current prices which gives us a lot of wiggle room. 

Wow what a weekend! Thank you all so much for your support.

We had 10,000 people register for Chart Summit, our Live Virtual Technical Analysis Conference. There were over 30 presentations and we raised over $50,000, just on the first day, to help fight COVID-19. You can still donate here.

We made it really easy to access the videos and organized them so you can go back and watch whenever you want. Just go to Chartsummit.com and click Watch The Videos and you're on your way!

In our market view update, we outlined how we're approaching stocks after catching last week's 20% rally in the Nifty 50.

In this post, we want to share an intermarket signal that's suggesting a defensive posture remains best when approaching stocks as an asset class.

Last week we looked for a counter-trend rally in stocks and we got it. The Nifty 50 rallied 20% from its intra-week low to its intra-week high, leaving a lot market participants asking if Indian stocks are out of the woods.

In this post, we're outlining why our defensive stance remains and how we're approaching the weeks ahead.

As markets start to (relatively) calm down, trading opportunities with clearly defined risk management levels are once again starting to reveal themselves.

One such opportunity is presenting right now in the semi-conductors space.

Are you ready for Chart Summit this Saturday??? I've never been more excited to attend a financial conference in my life. And I don't even have to leave my house!!! And it's FREE. Are you kidding me?

THIS SATURDAY 3/28 8AM-6PM ET

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From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

This week's Mystery Chart exercise gives us a nice glimpse into the current sentiment amid the recent volatility, so thanks to all those who responded. The overwhelming majority of you we're either selling or doing nothing, which comes as little surprise.

Many of you wanted to sell this chart aggressively and even cited the current market environment as part of you're reasoning. But! The chart was inverted... so all those who were pounding the table to short it were actually buying the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) relative to the Russell 3000 (IWV).

I'm curious to see how, if at all, this changes your perspective on the chart. Tweet me @sstrazza with your thoughts!

This week, the US Dollar/Rupee pair hit our upside objective and evidence suggests a near-term pullback is likely.

In this post, we'll update our risk management levels and outline why the Rupee remains at risk longer-term.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In a post earlier this month, we scanned the S&P 500 for the strongest uptrends so that we'd be prepared to buy stocks when the market stabilized. Well three weeks and an additional 25% drawdown later, and we're going to do a similar exercise.

The last two days' rally in stocks confirmed bullish breadth divergences which suggest a tradeable bottom is near and put the S&P 500 back above its 2018 lows around 2350, giving us a well-defined level to manage risk against. If prices fail to hold this level, all bets are off, but as long as we're above it, we think the bias is to the upside over the coming weeks to months. As such, we're looking for long opportunities that offer asymmetric risk/reward setups in the strongest stocks, three of which we outline below.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We are constantly analyzing market breadth. We do this not just for insight into the strength of the current trend but also because it helps us identify key turning points. We outlined a variety of deteriorating breadth measures in a post last month to support our bearish outlook on stocks, and the signal turned out to be quite timely as the market collapsed soon after.

With the market now severely oversold amid one of the swiftest bear markets in history, we're looking to breadth measures once again for signs of a tradeable low.