It's that time again. I have a mystery chart that I think is worth paying attention to. As always with these, I took out the y-axis and all labels to eliminate any biases. Remember, the idea is not to guess what this actually is (although most of you guys can't help yourselves). The point of this exercise is to think about what you would do?
This can be a Stock, ETF, Commodity, Currency, Index, Ratio, etc. What do you want to do here? Buy, Sell or Do Nothing?
I analyze the behavior of the market and market participants. I do this every day and have been doing this professionally for well over a decade. In 2008 I earned my Chartered Market Technician (CMT) designation and founded Allstarcharts.com in 2010. What started as just a humble blog has turned into one of the fastest growing technical analysis research platforms in the world. The platform is jam packed with actionable trade ideas and analysis, but I recognize this can be overwhelming at times. That's why I'm writing this post - to help our newer members take full advantage of all that the platform has to offer in a short period of time.
When you talk about the "stock market", there is so much more to it than the S&P500 or what the Dow did on a given day, week or month. These are just 2 popular indexes in the most popular country in the world. But in reality, that's all they really are. One of them, the S&P500 is cap-weighted, so the biggest companies in the world, $AAPL $FB $XOM etc, drive the direction of the index. The other, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is made up of just 30 humongous American stocks. That's what these things are.
The actual stock market, or "market of stocks", includes many more stocks and indexes, not just in the U.S., but globally. Today I want to talk about what we're seeing out of the Financials in Europe and what the implications of the recent behavior might be.
This weekend I took advantage of some time off to go over every single chart that I follow from all over the world. These include U.S. Stocks, Sectors and Indexes, International Indexes, Commodities, Currencies and Interest Rate Markets. There are many people complaining about the uncertainty in the current market environment. But I would argue that there is always uncertainty in the market and today is no different.
Back in January, Energy Stocks put in their lows on both an absolute and relative basis. Whether you're looking at the big Integrated Names like Exxon and Chevron, or the Services Companies like Schlumberger or Halliburton, or even the Explorers and Producers, they all bottomed in January, a month before Crude Oil finally put in its low. Energy stocks also bottomed first on a relative basis when compared with the S&P500.
Today we are looking at the current implications of this particular leadership in the stocks relative to the commodity and the direction in which they are heading:
For newer members I want to give a little bit of background on the 2016 Crude Oil Trade. Back in February our line in the sand was $29.60 based on multiple key Fibonacci extensions clustering together near that level. We wanted to be aggressively long Crude Oil along with energy stocks, emerging market country ETFs as well as the metals and mining stocks and commodities that had high correlations with that particular emerging space. With Crude Oil specifically, our tactical upside target was $38, and our longer-term target was $50. Both of these upside objectives have now been achieved.
Relative Strength is something that I take very seriously. When markets are falling, we want to look for stocks holding up the best. That is what we call relative strength and tends to lead us towards the future leaders for ensuing rallies. It's the same thing on the way up. When markets are rallying, like we saw in the past week for stocks, the ones that don't participate are showing their true colors.
One of the most valuable exercises throughout my process is going through every single country around the world looking at both weekly and daily charts. One by one I make my annotations and take my notes. This is certainly time consuming, but the process makes it impossible for me not to notice similar themes going on around the globe. I promise you from the bottom of my heart that the reason I got bullish in late January after being the biggest bear on The Street coming into 2016 was because of the behavior of global markets. My turning bullish had nothing to do with the U.S. stock market.
Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX) has fallen roughly 90% from its August 2015 highs, but is now potentially setting up for a counter-trend rally.
Structurally this stock remains in a strong downtrend, but is now testing long-term support near 25-27. Prices first tested this level in March and April of this year, rallied briefly, but are now slightly undercutting those lows as momentum attempts to put in a bullish divergence. If prices are above 27 on a weekly closing basis, that would confirm the bullish momentum divergence and failed breakdown.
