As US stocks rallied for most of this year, many stocks in the Metals, Mining, Coal, and Steel sectors could not get out of their own way and refused to participate in the broad rally. Back in March, All Star Charts published a report highlighting this. So naturally, as stocks begin to soften across the board, it's time to lean into these bad boys and push them off a cliff.

When trading against the primary trend, there are a few things we look for to define our risk and raise our probability of success.

We outlined them in a post a while back, but they essentially boil down to the following:

1. Our downside price target has been met.
2. Prices undercut that price target and quickly reversed.
3. Momentum diverged positively as prices made a new low.
4. Prices are very extended from their mean (200-day moving average).
5. Quick follow-through confirmed the supply/demand imbalance.
6. Short interest in the stock (not required, but amplifies move).

We are now seeing a few potential opportunities given that stocks have been hit, some harder than others, over the last few weeks.

Here's Reliance Infrastructure quickly reversing off our downside price objective near 100.30 as momentum diverges. As long...

In early June I'm coming to Europe to talk charts, meet with clients and try to learn as much as I can. I've been incredibly fortunate over the years to be able to speak at events and meet with investors all over Asia and around America. My trips to India, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and the Philippines have been great experiences that help me throughout my process every single day. Learning and experiencing as much as I can has easily been the most rewarding investment I've ever made.

My goal on this trip is to finally get to meet with people I've been interacting with regularly for many years, catch up with old friends who live there that I only get to see in the States, and getting new perspective from local clients and colleagues. That's the whole point. If you only hang out with people from New York, or the U.S. for that matter, you're only seeing things from that same lens. I want to know how other people look at things. That's how we grow.

If you're in Europe and want to make the trip, or if I'm coming to your backyard that's even better! I'll walk you through my process using the Top/Down Intermarket approach and we'll look at charts...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Every few weeks I get a message from someone asking a question along the lines of "Should I enroll in the CMT Program?" As with most things, the answer is it depends on your individual situation.

While I can't offer personalized advice to everyone, I can discuss my experience and the key benefits now that I've completed the process.

This post is going to be split into two parts; one where I explain my answer to the question that prompted this post, and the other where I summarize my actual experience in the program.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Wednesday's Mystery Chart is one of my favorite right now, so thank you everyone for your feedback and participation.

I received a lot of answers, but most of you were skeptical of the breakout and wanted to see more before getting involved. A few others wanted to be long with a tight stop and few, if any, were sellers.

With that as our backdrop, let's get into it.

The actual chart was the ratio of the Insurance subsector ($IAK) relative to the S&P 500, which is breaking out to 11-month highs as momentum gets overbought for the first time in nearly 2 years.

To me this looks like a textbook trend reversal, so while there may be some backing and filling over the near-term, Insurance stocks look set to outperform over the intermediate/long-term.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

The relative strength is also...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

The trend is your friend...but what do we do if there is no trend?

Paul Ciana and I go way back to 2006 when him and I were studying for the CMT exams together. Today, Paul is the Chief FICC Technical Strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research. In English, that means everything outside of equities. It's nice to see your friends succeed and watching him crush it is definitely one for the good guys.

In this podcast episode we dive deep into the FX world where Paul walks us through 3 important currency pairs that all stock market investors should follow. We talk about Crude Oil and Gold and other precious metals. The Dollar is a key focus right now for both Paul and me, so we get into what the implications are for stocks and other assets around the world.

I really enjoyed this conversation. It could have gone on for hours...

Markets are getting a little shaky. No real surprise. We've had a huge run to start the year and it's only natural for there to be givebacks along the way. Markets don't go straight up forever. That's not how this works.

That said, there are some sectors and stocks that are still holding up relatively well that require our attention. If this turns out to be another garden variety correction then we're going to want to be long names that are standing strong now -- these are likely to be the next leaders. The All Star Charts team published a bullish piece on the Energy sector a couple weeks ago, and not much has changed since. The sector and its stocks have pretty much gone sideways. One stock that has my attention now is:

These are the registration details for the monthly conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts. In this call we will discuss the global market environment and how to profit from it. As always, this will include Stocks, Interest Rates, Commodities and Currencies. The video of the call will be archived in the members section to re-watch any time and the PDF of the charts will be made available as well.

This month’s Conference Call will be held on Monday May 13th at 7PM ET. Here are the details for the call:

About eight months ago Patrick Dunuwila from The Chart Report introduced me to a new data visualization platform called Koyfin. Two month's later I met Rob, one of the co-founders, at Stocktoberfest West. He walked me through the product and what they were doing and I was sold.

A few months later we had the opportunity to invest and we jumped at it. We loved the product and the team, so it seemed like a natural fit.

Today, Koyfin is an irreplaceable tool that I use alongside Optuma as my main tools for charting and analysis.

I get a lot of questions about how I use it, so I wanted to write a post answering just that.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and eliminate the x and y-axes and and all labels eliminated to minimize bias. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. It can even be inverted or a custom index.

The point here is to not guess what it is, but instead to think about what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?