Going country by country all over the world is one of the best tools that we have as market participants. The value that I’ve gotten over the years from looking at the behavior of all of the countries, instead of just the U.S. is a huge factor in why I am such a top/down weight-of-the-evidence guy. There are signs of strength and weakness that we see from international markets that might not be so obvious in the S&P500, for example.

Last September, I promise you that the reason I got bullish tactically was not because of what I was seeing in the United States, but what was happening around the world. There were simply too many bullish momentum divergences and downside objective achieved internationally to ignore. Something was up, and in fact, the counter-trend rally that we got in the U.S. actually exceeded my expectations.

Momentum is a word that is used an awful lot when referring to public markets. You hear people talk about "momentum stocks" or how they're seeing a "momentum shift". Unfortunately most of these references are just off-the-cuff sort of statements that don't have any real meaning. "It sounds good, so let's use it", kind of mentality. For me, it is a really important part of my process and I want to explain to you how I use it.

First of all, I am not an oscillator junkie. We all know that guy with 27 indicators plotted beneath the price on a chart. That isn't me. I like my charts clean. It's amazing how much you can see when you just get everything else the hell out of the way. My preference is a 14-period Relative Strength Index, otherwise known as RSI. Don't confuse this with

The big level that I've been watching in S&Ps has been that 1880-1890 area representing support in August and September, which was also resistance back in early 2014. To me, this has been the big line in the sand. I see no reason to be short this market if prices are above those levels, and we're finishing up the week above it. So now what?

Structurally speaking, I don't think it changes anything bigger picture. We are still in a downtrend in U.S. Stocks as the weight-of-the-evidence suggests that we ultimately head much lower. We saw more new 52-week lows on the NYSE this week than we did at the August lows, an expansion in weakness, in other words. Financials have collapsed on a relative basis, hitting fresh multi-year lows

When we talk about leadership in the market, I think it's important to go sector by sector to see where the leaders are and where the laggards might be. To help with this study, we take a look at each of the 10 S&P Sectors and compare them to the performance of the S&P500. This Relative Strength Analysis is one of the best ways to see sector rotation and changes in market leadership.

I have just updated all of the Sector vs S&P500 charts in the ChartBook and here are some of my notes:

A big reason why I've been bearish towards the U.S. Stock Market is because I'm in the weight-of-the-evidence business and globally stocks have been getting crushed. It was only a matter of time before the selling came to the United States Index. A good example of a broken market making new lows is India's Nifty Fifty Index.

That was fun wasn't it? S&Ps lost a cool 13% since the last week of 2015. You think that's a lot? Emerging Markets lost 16% during that period. The Russell 2000 Small-cap Index lost over 17%. Micro-caps lost over 18%. 13 is nothing. And get used to it, because I think there is a lot more selling coming.

Today, we're going to focus on what the S&P500 looks like because that is what all of you keep asking me about. I like to look at stock markets from a more global perspective, taking into account what other asset classes are doing like commodities, currencies and interest rates. Remember, I'm in the weight-of-the-evidence business. I believe that in order to navigate through what is a constantly evolving global marketplace, taking the weight-of-the-evidence is the best approach. But today, we'll take a deep dive look at S&Ps on their own.

While everyone is making a big fuss about S&Ps making new lows, or Oil hitting new lows, or the amount of stocks in the NYSE hitting new lows, believe it or not, there are plenty of things making new highs. So although we've been bearish towards the U.S. Stock Market for months and could not be happier to see stocks continuing to sell off, today I want to focus on something that is making new highs.

This is a 20-year chart of Gold relative to the CRB index. This index is comprised of 19 Commodities including Crude Oil, Copper, Corn, Sugar, Gold etc. We consider the CRB to be the benchmark for the commodities markets

The Head and Shoulders experts are popping up everywhere these days. Never has there been a price pattern searched for or imagined in people's minds more than the infamous Head & Shoulders Pattern. Funny, as much as they love to talk about it and as much airtime as it gets on the TV and Internets, it's actually one of the more rare patterns driven by supply and demand. The reason it is so rare is because, by definition, it is a reversal pattern. Since markets trend, and ongoing trends tend to continue trending in their direction, by looking for a Head and Shoulders Pattern, you are doing the exact opposite of what we're trying to do here in the first place: recognize trends.

As a simple definition, a Head and Shoulders pattern, in this case, a Head and Shoulders Top, is made up of two higher highs (the "Left Shoulder" and the "Head"), followed by a lower high ("Right Shoulder"). After each of the prior higher highs, the ensuing sell-offs should find support near

It doesn't matter what this chart is. Tell me this isn't a structural breakout to kick off the New Year?

We held a free webinar this week to show off our new ChartBook and discuss how to best invest for 2016 using intermarket analysis. At All Star Charts, we use a global top/down approach in order to take the weight-of-the-evidence in Stocks, Commodities, Currencies and Interest Rates to come up with a theme. Once we have a major global theme, we will break it down to specific U.S. Sectors or Country ETFs and either buy or short individual ETFs or stocks to express our theme using strict risk management procedures