One thing we know about all-time highs is that they are not evidence of a downtrend. With near-record pessimism towards stocks recently, it's fun to watch the ones that are breaking out to all-time highs. I'm not really sure what everyone is so angry about, these long bases are slowly breaking out one by one, not breaking down.

Something we've been pointing to all along is that for the major indexes to take out resistance from the past 17 months, we need to see an expansion in participation to the upside. In other words, more stocks, sectors and indexes breaking out to all-time highs. This expansion of breadth is likely to lead and/or coincide with an upside resolution in indexes like the S&P500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, Global100 Index and many others. 

It feels good to be back in the office listening to music and ripping through charts! This is something I love to do. The past few weeks were incredible. I met with a lot of smart people throughout Europe and I'm back with new perspective, new ideas and new friends. You can't put a price tag on those experiences. When people ask me what they should invest in, I can't help but answer with: yourself. Invest in what you're doing and what you're learning. I believe this to be true now more than ever.

The first thing that stands out to me as I work through my chartbooks is how little things have changed, particularly in the stock market. The S&P500 is up 1% since I left a month ago. The rangebound market we've been in continues to progress in the same direction, or lack thereof. In mid-May I pointed to the Global 100 as the chart that tells the stock story the best. At that point, we were looking at a 3rd test of overhead...

One of the things I harp on here is Best Practices. When I make it a habit to engage in best practices in terms of both strategy selection and position management, I put myself in position to win more often.

Best Practices skews odds in my favor. It keeps me from swimming upstream against volatility currents. It keeps my risk lower. It helps with P/L consistency. And it helps me stick with trades that still have time to play out.

Selling Half is a position management best practice I employ most often when trading straight long calls and long puts. I like to sell half of my position when the value of the position has doubled. It can be very tempting to want to hold your entire position if it quickly runs up and you find yourself sitting on tremendous profits thanks to the leverage inherent in long options. And certainly, there are times when I wished I would've just sat on my hands as I watched a stock continue to fly higher. But for every one of those times I wish I had, there are easily five other times I'm glad I hadn't.

You see, when a position doubles or triples (or more) in size, the open profits are nice -- but they are distracting. What??? Hear me...

A week ago we outlined two major breakouts in the largest components of the Nifty Infrastructure and Nifty Public Sector Bank Indexes, however, we also outlined the waning upside momentum that remains a problem.

For premium members, we performed a deep dive into the Infrastructure space to provide trade opportunities outside of Larsen & Toubro, so in this post I want to summarize what we saw when performing the same exercise for Nifty Public Sector Bank components.

There are a number of great services for options traders out there that offer smart ideas for premium selling, or Iron Condor trading, or earnings trades -- I'm friends with many of the best practitioners. They are fantastic at what they do and I'm happy to name names. Just ask.

Subscribers to All Star Options come to us for option trade ideas which take advantage of directional edges the All Star Charts research team uncovers through exhaustive technical analysis. We are not beholden to any particular type of strategy, options spread, or timeframe. We simply examine each opportunity on a case-by-case basis and make an informed decision on what we feel is a good way to play a particular situation. We might not always end up picking the "best" way to leverage into a opportunity, but we think over time and over many iterations, our good decisions compound favorably.

We're just as likely to go long premium as we are to go short premium. Sometimes we just buy long calls, and other times we put on bullish Risk Reversal trades. Or maybe we'll sell a Bear Call Spread or a bearish Put Calendar Spread. We...

Last week I was in London giving a presentation at the local chapter of the CMT Association. We had a great turnout and they asked a lot of really smart questions. I was not surprised at all by the high caliber of attendees, from Analysts to Portfolio Managers and even younger participants eager to learn. It was awesome all around.

Prior to the event I sat down with Alex Spiroglou to talk about how I first got into Technical Analysis and what a normal day at ASC Research looks like. This is the full video of that interview.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

I just finished this week's Top 10 Charts Report for Institutional Clients, but I wanted to carve out two Asian Equity Market charts for this post to highlight a tactical opportunity we're seeing in that part of the world.

So I did.

Let's take a look.

These are the registration details for the monthly conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts. In this call we will discuss the global market environment and how to profit from it. As always, this will include Stocks, Interest Rates, Commodities and Currencies. The video of the call will be archived in the members section to re-watch any time and the PDF of the charts will be made available as well.

This month’s Conference Call will be held on Monday June 19th at 7PM ET. Here are the details for the call:

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Today we're looking at two Commodity charts that offer both intermarket signals and potential trading opportunities.

Late last week we discussed the structural breakout in Larsen & Toubro, so today we want to look into the entire sector to see what other opportunities there are among its components.

Earlier this month I was invited to come speak at the Hellenic chapter of the CMT Association in Athens, Greece. We had a much bigger crowd that I expected. I've had the opportunity to speak at many of the chapters around the world, including all over Asia, North America and Europe. I felt this was one of the better Q&A Sessions we've had. We were able to get the audio so I wanted to share that with you today. Some of the audience questions were not as clear as we would like, so bear with us. Hope you enjoy!