Earlier this month we outlined the "Five Bull Market Barometers" we're watching to identify the beginning of a new bull market in stocks.

In this post, we'll update those charts without going into as much detail as to why they're important. So if you haven't read our initial post linked above, we'd encourage you to check it out.

With that said, let's jump in and see how these charts have developed since.

Friday afternoons are my favorite part of the week, but not just because the weekend is starting. Instead, it's because we get fresh weekly candles to analyze the long-term trends of the securities and assets in our universe.

And this week, we've got a big development in Silver. Prices went out at their highest weekly closing price since September 2013.

Let's take a look at what it means and how we're trading it.

We often hear about Japanese Candlesticks? But what's the difference between a hollow candle and a filled one? What do these colors represent?

This explanation is taken directly from Lesson 1 from the Allstarcharts Charting School:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We write a lot about focusing on the secular leaders in each sector and industry. Whether it's online retail, medical devices, or more niche areas like data-centers or mobile payments, they tend to share a common thread of innovation and technology.

Biotech fits this theme and has become an emerging leader, making new all-time highs for the first time in almost five years. It's been one of the top-performing subsectors off the lows and one of the first to reclaim its year-to-date highs.

In this post, we're going to drill into the space and highlight one of its strongest areas... Genomics.

This is a special weekend. The close on Friday marks the end of the day, week and month. That means we have a fresh batch of weekly AND monthly charts waiting for us. This process provides a lot of information because, by stepping back, it forces us to identify the direction of the primary trend.

In the meantime, a few shorter-term charts caught my attention. Both have been horrendous laggards in this market: Regional Banks and Industrials. My question here is whether or not we're seeing a changing of the guard?

Here are Regional Banks relative to the S&P500 putting in what appears like a fairly clean double bottom. Momentum putting in a bullish divergence is a nice touch:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Sentiment has not been good for Chinese Equities with a handful of recent sanctions adding to the general uncertainty around China-US relations. For the most part, we're seeing this reflected in price as the Shanghai Composite and iShares China Large-Cap ETF (FXI) are trading at multi-month lows relative to the S&P 500.

Interestingly enough, the area being hit hardest with negative headlines is one of the few bright spots in China's market right now... Technology and Internet stocks.

In this post, we take a look at the improving relative strength from this group and offer trade ideas in some of its leading stocks.

Here is the ratio chart of the Kraneweb Chinese Internet ETF (KWEB) vs the S&P 500 (SPY) which we've been writing about since November.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

Price resolved...

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In the latest All Star Charts Monthly Conference Call, JC laid out a number of bullish trades. In the week or so since that call, a number of the stocks mentioned have since pulled back. Does that mean the trades are dead?

Not necessarily.

Nothing goes up in a straight line. And if you're a believer that our current pullback is just a result of sector rotation and a reload for a later resumption higher, then you've got to be a lover (as I am) of opportunities to enter the strongest stocks as they pause and/or pull back a bit.

With that in mind, we're putting a trade on in a Pharma stock that has the wind in it's sails.

The market remains a hot mess where we're preferring market-neutral trades, however, some absolute trades are appropriate when the reward/risk is skewed heavily in our favor.

We outlined some favorable longs and shorts earlier today.

Another way of skewing the reward/risk in our favor is by looking for "big bases."

The way we learned it is the bigger the base, the higher in space and this is certainly a big base. And the reason we like looking for base breakouts in this environment is two-fold.

First off, big bases take time to form because they are caused by steady institutional accumulation. Mom and pop investors aren’t the ones creating this type of pattern, so we know that there’s underlying demand that will support prices if they do move lower.

Because prices have memory and the base has taken a significant period of time to build, there’s likely been more trading at each price level...

We remain in an environment where there are stocks going up, stocks going down, and many stocks doing a whole lot of nothing.

We're being very selective before putting money to work and just reiterated a few short setups in the Financial Services Sector.

In this post, we're focused on stocks exhibiting specific conditions that create a reward/risk opportunity that is ridiculously skewed in our favor.

In late April we highlighted the relative weakness in the Nifty Financial Services Index and highlighted several individual stocks that stood out as leaders and laggards.

One of our six charts to watch this week is the Nifty Bank Index, so today we want to look at two stocks showing symptoms of the underlying problem in the sector.

Don't fight the tape. The markets are moving higher, whether we agree with it or not.

That said, we want to be long the strongest stocks. This is trendfollowing 101.

Last week, Steve Strazza put up a bunch of ideas in semiconductors which have been leading the way. Many are now breaking out so we're going to put on an options trade to take a jump into this trend.