The best hour I spend each month is going over my Monthly Candlestick Charts. I can't understand how some people don't do it. Think about it: 12 hours of your life per year. Imagine all the things you do throughout the year that takes you 12 hours and probably does you more harm than good.

If you forget everything I ever tell you, please just remember not to ignore the monthly candlesticks. It doesn't matter if you're a short-term trader or longer-term investor or anything in between. Getting longer-term perspective and identifying the direction of the primary trend is the most important thing we do. Once that has been determined, then we can incorporate multiple timeframes to break it down to our time horizon of choice, whether it's more intermediate or short-term.

Since November is now in the books, it's that time of the month to rip through a ton of Monthly Candlestick charts. Here's what I'm seeing out there:

I get asked a lot about moving averages. Many people think they are this incredible indicator that will lead to riches. Unfortunately, they're the furthest thing from that. These are just invisible lines that people like to paint different colors to exaggerate their meaning. There are all different kinds of moving averages: some are shorter-term, some are longer-term, some give more weight to recent prices while others are equally weighted. I like to say that if you have enough moving averages on your screen, one of them will work!

Today I'd like to share with you in simple terms how I use them:

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December's Strategy Session will be held on Thursday, December 2nd at 7 PM IST. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with all of our past conference calls.

Here are the details for Tuesday:

I look at a lot of charts. The best way to visualize the changes in equilibrium between supply and demand just so happens to be in chart form. If there was a better way to do it I would use that instead. So I'm stuck ripping through thousands and thousands of charts a week. I'm cool with it. It's something I enjoy doing because I know that the only way to properly weigh all of the evidence is to actually weigh it all.

One of the most valuable things I do is to go through every single U.S. Market Index. It really helps get perspective from all sorts of different angles, whether it is various market caps or weighting combinations. I've learned that it's not just about the S&P500 or Nasdaq100 or Dow Jones Industrial Average. It's how they are all getting along with one another that I'm most concerned with.

We'll go one by one discussing risk levels, targets and implications:

This week on the podcast we have Charlie Bilello, Chartered Market Technician and Director of Research at Pension Partners, LLC. Charlie is someone many of us consider to be a deep thinker. The former Charles Dow Award winner is well known for busting stock market myths made popular by members of the media and other types of people who do not even participate in markets. In this episode we discuss why news consumption tends to do more harm than good, what some of the alternatives are and why it is a good idea to follow market behavior, instead of people's opinions. We get into the current market environment and discuss the current sentiment and price action in Gold, Bitcoin and US Equities. Charlie is one of the ones I knew I wanted to have on this podcast...

It was Thanksgiving last week and the hot topic all over dinner tables throughout the world was about Bitcoin. Older relatives asking younger nieces and nephews to explain crypto-currencies was probably something pretty hilarious to watch by being a fly on the wall of many households.

In the spirit of the holidays, I thought I would post a couple of charts that I think are worth sharing with those family members and friends who are coming out of the woodwork asking about the not so new asset class. While I don't particularly care about the actual technology behind blockchain, I do think it's important to focus on the behavior of these markets. This is how we can responsibly calculate risk vs reward propositions. That's what this is about at the end of the day right? We're here to make money.

Chris Kimble is one of those Technical Analysts that I started following a long time ago. He incorporates an intermarket approach and consistently uses multiple timeframes. Those are things that definitely get my attention. In this podcast, Chris shares with us some of his experiences with his mentor Sir John Templeton. While we talk about a lot of the lessons that we've learned over the years, this conversation dives into the short-term and longer-term outlook for Gold, the US Dollar, Crude Oil and Interest Rates. Sentiment is something that Chris and I both focus on so I think this conversation is well rounded in terms of having both an educational focus and actionable ideas for the current market environment.

One thing that often gets forgotten is that we don't live in a vacuum. Life in the market is not just about absolute performance, but about how assets behave relative to their peers. The stock market isn't the biggest game in town, it's the bond market. But let's not forget about metals either. When stocks are in bull markets, they're not just going up as a group, they are also outperforming the alternatives.

Today we're taking a look at stocks, not just on their own, but relative to the other assets. We know that on their own stocks are making new all-time highs. This is happening all over the world. Stocks in the U.S. aren't up because of what's happening in New York or Washington DC. Stocks in the U.S. are up because stocks all over the world are going up, both in developed and emerging markets, despite of what is happening in New York and Washington DC.

Some people have this misconception that stocks are in the later innings of this uptrend. I've been arguing, almost religiously, that they are probably much closer to the beginning of the bull market than near the end. So no, this is not the 9th year of a bull market, I think we're probably early in...

As I continue to go through all of the stocks in my chartbook, I thought it would be good to post some of the more interesting ones. I've tried my best to identify only the stocks showing both relative strength and momentum, but that also present a favorable risk vs reward opportunity. This helps makes this portion of the analysis more actionable. You can see the more global macro context here, and you can see my list of Technology stocks I like here.

In this post, we are focusing only on the Healthcare Sector and the specific industries within it. 

We're here to make money in the market aren't we? Some people want to gossip about tax cuts or who the next fed chair might be. I personally see no absolutely value in this sort of data. In fact, I believe it does more harm than good.

We want to turn the TV off, shut down the twitters and social medias and focus on the only thing that matters: price. The first thing we do is identify what the current market environment looks like. In this process we include stock market indexes in both the U.S. and all over the world, Commodities, Interest Rates and Currencies. Once we have laid out exactly what sort of environment we're in, then we can dig down to the individual sector level and ultimately to stock specific ideas. But all of this must be done after we've identified what sort of environment we're currently in.

Click here to see what the current environment is like today:

This is what I'm seeing out of Technology stocks specifically. While there are a few stocks with shorting potential, and some other stocks not...

The noise machines are getting louder these days with Junk Bond Funds falling to levels not seen since March. You have the frustrated stock market bears data mining the heck out of everything trying to find something to justify their losing positions, or lack of winning ones in many cases. Remember it's not just about the money they've lost trying to short the stock market, it's the overwhelming amount of opportunity cost already incurred by simply not being long enough. It's double the frustration. I've noticed these bears turning to the bond market for guidance.

While the yield curve continues to fall, we've actually found that historically the stock market does the best when the yield curve is exactly where it is today (2s-10s specifically). But today I want to talk about the spreads between Junk Bonds and Government Bonds. When the stock market is showing plenty of evidence of risk appetite, we want to see the bond market confirming that as well, not diverging from it.