With a new month comes a fresh batch of Monthly Candlesticks. As you are all well aware, I find this exercise to be incredibly valuable. It forces us to identify the direction of the primary trend.
Today we got new Monthly Candlesticks and while updating the chartbook for our Premium Members, I couldn't help but think the chart below describes the environment we're currently in quite well.
Today we got new Monthly Candlesticks. We wrote a free post on the biggest theme from this month, but this post will go through a few more charts that stood out.
We're headed into another monthly expiration cycle and its time to take some action on open positions with options expiring in March. Not going to sugar coat it -- March positions have been challenging!
Finding things to short on an absolute basis has been tough since December, however, Shipping stocks appear to be presenting an attractive reward/risk for those looking to express a bearish thesis in the market.
Howard Lindzon has always been there for me. He is the founder of Stocktwits, who originally built Allstarcharts.com back in 2010 and welcomed me into their network of bloggers. Many of these are still around today and doing better than ever!
Chart Summit was a "Ski during the day and Chart at night" event held on February 22-23, 2019 in Breckenridge, CO. I co-hosted it with Brian Shannon and this is the video of my presentation:
The Top/Down Approach to Financial Markets using Technical Analysis
If there is any group out there that is feeling the frustration, it's the gold bug community. Gold is at the same price today that it was a year ago, 5 years ago and 8 years ago. During that time frame, the S&P500 has more than doubled. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up more that 14,000 points, again more than doubling during this period.
Even U.S. Treasury Bonds made money as interest rates collapsed. The bond ETF $TLT was up over 60% before retracing some of that over the past couple of years. But still, up substantially and clearly outperforming precious metals.
You could have literally been in anything other than these commodities and made money. But from epic frustration comes secular periods for profit. I think this is what we have here:
Don't look now, but all-time highs are starting to pop up for some well known names. And after just completing the "hundred-dollar-roll," we've got an old classic offering us a cheap opportunity to play for some outsized relative gains.
The noisemakers love to talk to you about something they like to call FANG, or FAANG or FAAMG. I think they change it each time, depending on which narrative their trying to pass along to the unaware. They're here to make noise, we're only here to make money. See the difference?
What you will hear every day, if you choose to subject yourself to their crap, is that Google and Amazon are only up 6% this year. What you won't hear is that the Equally-weighted Technology Index just broke out to new all-time highs relative to the traditional Market Cap-Weighted Technology Index.
Chart Summit 2019 is in the books. This is the first time I've ever hosted a live financial conference. The last 2 Chart Summits were 100% virtual. I'm not exactly a "conference thrower" and neither is my co-host Brian Shannon. But somehow everything worked out and we had an incredible few days up in beautiful Breckenridge Colorado!
Brian and I love skiing and analyzing charts. As it turns out, there are a lot of other people like that too! I'd like to thank everyone who attended our event. It would not have been possible without you!
