One of my favorite things to talk about is Behavioral Finance and Investor Psychology. The whole thing is incredibly fascinating to me. That's why I was super stoked when Dr. Daniel Crosby invited me on his Standard Deviations Podcast.

Usually I'm the one asking him the questions, but this time he flipped the script. This was a lot of fun!

One thing they don't teach you in the books is the old Technical pattern, "The Hot Mess".

You know when you look at a chart just churning sideways....

Probably trading near flat moving averages....

Below overhead supply....

There's no real edge in either direction....

Traders are getting chopped up in what feels like quicksand....

That, my friends, is a Hot Mess.

The market has been moving sideways for two months now. But that does not mean that every sector will reflect the same move.

As the story of a market cycle unfolds, various sectors assume importance just like different characters in a play. Currently, the Chemicals segment is in the spotlight so let's see what its constituents are up to!

The Chemicals segment has been showing strength over the past few days with some interesting setups lined up. We included one such setup in our Trade of the Week post.

First up, we have Pidilite Industries which is now moving back into positive territory as it inches towards its overhead resistance at 1,800. The price has consolidated in the range of 1700-1820 and looks ready for a breakout as the indicator attempts to move higher. With the overall sector in focus, Pidilite could be dolling up to participate in the next leg of the rally.

We are bullish above the risk management level of 1,820 with a target near 2,030.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In our continued effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger Macro thesis, we recently rolled out our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."

We write a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from this universe of stocks.

We've already had some great trades come out of this column and couldn't be happier about the early feedback.

Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.

In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.

Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy done.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

The latest 2-to-100 Club Report is out with a handful of actionable names to participate in.

These aren't trades where we expect a face-ripping rally to imminently commence. But we do think there are underlying trends that can propel these names higher over the next 3-6 months.

With that in mind, I've got a trade in November options on deck to play one of my favorites from this report.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Check out our latest Mystery Chart!

What we do here is take a chart that’s captured our attention, and remove the x and y-axes as well as any other labels that could help identify it.

This chart can be of any security, in any asset class, on any timeframe. Sometimes it’s an absolute price chart, other times it’s on a relative basis.

It might be a ratio, a custom index, or maybe the price is inverted. It could be all three!

The point is, when we aren’t able to recognize what’s in front of us, we put aside any biases we may have and scrutinize it objectively.

While you can try to guess the chart, the point is to make a decision…

So let us know what it is… Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

This week we're looking at a long setup in the Chemical sector. Certain stocks from this sector are grabbing our attention and we're looking at one of those!

We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.

This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.

In the wake of this week's events, I thought I would take a moment to remind everyone that nothing should surprise you.

The longer you're in this game, the more things you see. The newer you are at this, the easier it is to not know some of the history of markets.

And that's okay. You don't have to know everything the moment you start.

That's what the experience is for.

But I will let you all in on a little secret, regardless of how long you've been around:

From the desk of Steve Strazza & Grant Hawkridge

Don't miss this weeks Momentum Report; our weekly summation of all the major indexes at a Macro, International, Sector and Industry Group level. As a reminder, we analyze this shorter-term data within the context of the structural trends at play.

We're looking for trends.

That's why Technical Analysis works. Because stock market returns are not normally distributed. We have the data. It's not a secret.

Stocks trend. They go up for a while, they go down for a while and sometimes they can go sideways for a while.

Interest rates, commodities and currencies all act the same way. That's just how markets behave.

You can choose to pretend that it's not that way.

But we have the math that proves that it is.

So that's why we do this. That's why we rip through thousands of charts every week to identify which ways things are going.

All things.

Here's one of the biggest charts that continues to point to any choppy environment just being part of a bigger uptrend for stocks and risk assets: