The bond market is the biggest market in the world. Hello?
It's easy to get caught up in the daily noise about some crypto currency or a biotech stock. But these are tiny tiny tiny itsy bitsy little markets. The bond market is a real market, with actual money in it and driven by the largest financial institutions and governments all over the world. If you want real information, the bond market is where to get it.
My friend Larry McDonald, a former Lehman Brothers Bond Trader, was on a recent podcast episode of Technical Analysis Radio talking about exactly this. I encourage you to give it a listen, it's not long.
Say what you want about rubber and tyres, but they seem to be a great business. I have a stock today that I wanted to share with you that I think does well moving forward, but also outperforms the rest of the auto industry.
Chart Summit 2018 is in the books. What another great day of thought out presentations filled with both educational and timely actionable material. We try to make it a point here not to live life in theory, but in reality. I go to too many conferences where all the discussions are purely academic and theoretical. Listen, I understand that this sort of material is 'evergreen' and can be watched for a long time afterwards. Sure, and I like some of that too, don't get me wrong. But we're here in the market to make money. So we want to see you put your tools to work in the current market environment. What are we buying and what are we selling? Let's make sure to talk about what's most important!
This year I invited a group of presenters that I thought each brought a different perspective on the markets. Last year I tried to do something similar, but the 2018 Chart Summit was unique in many ways. Once again, we were broadcasting live from the internet on a Saturday so our audience was all over the world in the comfort of their own houses, flats and dorm rooms. The diversity of attendees was one for the record books, in terms of age, sex, location and occupation.
It's amazing how many people in this world completely ignore monthly charts. I never understood it. It's an exercise that only needs to be done once a month. It's not like eating healthy or working out that you have to do it consistently for it to work. This is 30 minutes per month! 30 minutes! 12 times a year. That's 6 hours of work that will be the most important and productive 6 hours of the entire year. Even if you have a short-term time horizon, all of these shorter-term trends come within the context of a much larger structural picture.
This weekend was our second annual Chart Summit. I still can't believe all the amazing feedback that continues to come in after this event. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart, both the presenters and the audience members. I didn't think we could make something even better than the original, but I think based on the responses, we may have actually pulled it off. Wow!
Our video production folks are hard at work putting all the videos together, but I've picked out the ones I did so I can share with all of you as soon as possible. The rest will be out this week.
It's hard to ignore a sector that is breaking out to new highs, especially when it's something that it hasn't done in a long time. Biotechnology has been a laggard for years. If we've wanted to be in healthcare, it certainly has not been in Biotech or Pharma, it's been Medical Equipment stocks. But it's 2018 and times are changing.
Today we're looking at breakouts in both the Equally-weighted Biotechnology Fund $XBI and the Cap-weighted Biotechnology Fund $IBB. Because of the very different composition of the two sector funds, we want to make sure to always watch the behavior of both. The $XBI tells a better story of the sector because it is not dominated by the big names like Amgen or Gilead. But at the same time, we're not going to just throw out the fact that $AMZN is a huge component of the Discretionary space, for example. So I think it's important to always keep an eye on both the cap-weighted and equally-weighted sector indexes.
One of the most recent developments that stands out among the sector rotation that we're seeing is the strength in IT Stocks. We're seeing a breakout on the NIFTY IT Sector Index and we're seeing that IT Sector Index breaking out relative to the NIFTY500. So in other words, we're seeing massive breakouts on both an absolute and relative basis. Those are characteristics of uptrends, not downtrends.
Today we're focusing specifically on the NIFTY IT Index and how it's doing compared to the rest of the market. You can see here how the NIFTY IT Index is breaking out to new all-time highs and now holding above the former highs from 2015. If we're above that former resistance we want to be very aggressively long IT Stocks:
We are getting the breakouts we've been looking for in the IT Sector. We're not just seeing it in the sector itself, the breakout is coming on a relative basis as well. The IT Sector has been a terrible underperformer the last several years. In fact, it peaked relative to the rest of the market in 2014, over a year before it peaked on an absolute basis. It's 2018 and things are different.
Today we're taking a look at the IT Stocks in India and which ones we need to be buying.
Biotechnology has not been something you've been hearing me pound the table about for a long time. I was a huge Biotech bull in 2015, but this has not been something we've wanted to be involved with much since. The biggest reason is for the dramatic under-performance. The winning areas have been in Technology, Industrials and Financials, not Biotechnology. If we've wanted to be in healthcare at all it's been in the Medical Device and Equipment stocks, not Pharma or Biotech.
It's 2018 now and things are changing; sectors are rotating. We're seeing strength in Energy, Materials and really just Natural Resources in general. Canada and Australia breaking out finally points to strength in that area as well.
Today we're going to talk specifically about Biotechnology and if/where we want to be involved.
This weekend I hosted the 2nd annual Chart Summit, a virtual technical analysis conference that is free for everyone and anyone to attend. It all started a year ago when I got a bunch of really smart friends together on a Saturday to share their process with the world and their thoughts on the current market environment. It was such a success that we may have accidentally created the greatest Technical Analysis Conference of all time, and it was FREE. You can still watch the videos of those presentations on the original Chart Summit 2017 page.
Our presenters this year didn't skip a beat. They took it right from where we left off last year and killed it in Chart Summit 2018. I know I personally learned a lot, and based on the emails and comments that seems like a pretty universal feeling among the audience. We had fun and we got different perspectives about market behavior from a variety of approaches. That's what it was about. I was blown away by some of the presentations. It was awesome!
Register here for our live monthly conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts India.
January's Strategy Session will be held on Tuesday, February 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.
