Expert technical analysis of financial markets by JC Parets
by Tom Bruni
From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting
Interest rates are on the move, with the Ten-Year Treasury Yield breaking 3% once again after working off its failed breakout attempt from May. One relationship that’s highly correlated with the Ten-Year Yield is Regional Banks vs REITS. We’ve written about this relationship in 2016 and 2017, but it’s at an important inflection point so today’s chart is going to revisit it.
by JC
I’m not the kind of guy that likes to give funny names to price patterns in the market. For me, it’s more about the implications of that market behavior and less about what we call it. Today I want to take a look at US Treasury Bonds and what some price observers might refer to as a ‘Head & Shoulders Top’.
The reason this is a popular pattern is because, as humans, it is easy for us to identify and relate to. Each of us have a pair of shoulders and a head that stands in between and above them. In today’s chart, the Head and 2 Shoulders are fairly easy to point out. We’re looking at the US Treasury Bond ETF $TLT: [Read more…]
by JC
This is the most valuable analysis I do every month. When you sit there with some music on and just rip through monthly charts, it really gives you perspective. We’re taking a step back and reanalyzing the trends. It’s easy to get caught in the day-to-day noise. This exercise helps avoid getting whipped around. I encourage everyone to make their own list of Monthly Candles. [Read more…]
by JC
As homo sapiens we’re hard wired to feel the need to gossip. This goes back hundreds of thousands of years throughout evolution. We still see it today and through the speed of communication technology, that gossip gets amplified. While some would argue the issues of today’s society are unique, anyone who studies history knows that none of what we’re seeing today is new.
It’s our job as investors to be aware of this cognitive behavior flaw and work on avoiding the potentially disastrous implications of allowing our evolutionary gossip habits to enter into our portfolio decision making process. I’ve seen some amazing technicians and traders let their political opinions get in the way of their “process” and watched their horrible downfall. It’s been heart wrenching to watch, but the lessons learned by witnessing their collapse is something that will stay with me forever.
The current political and economic environment is unique in it’s own way, but they always are. Rather than focusing on the noise, I’ve found it extremely valuable to pay attention to the only thing that actually pays us: price.
I rip through 5000 charts a week, and most of the time even more than that. We’re talking U.S. Stocks and Sectors, European stocks, indexes and sectors, India, Southeast Asia and Latin America. I’m searching far and wide for signs of all of these troubles that I keep hearing about in the gossip news outlets. I just don’t see it. To the contrary, I see healthy sector rotation, consistency in positive breadth and momentum, and an overwhelming amount of bullish signs relative to any bearish ones.
You guys know which stocks and sectors I like. That hasn’t changed at all in the past week. So rather than reiterate some of the more favorable risk vs reward opportunists I see out there, the Trade Ideas page is available for Premium Members here. Instead, today I want to focus on a few things I see out in the world that make me look at the glass half full, rather than half empty like so many people I see doing out there. [Read more…]
by JC
This is the video recording of the February 2018 Conference Call. This month we’re starting with the weakness of the U.S. Dollar and how we can profit from the circumstances. The rotation into areas like Base Metals, Emerging Markets, Gold and Mining Stocks fits into that theme of weaker Dollars. We’re seeing strength in both develop market currencies and emerging.We’re seeing that strength in both developed market currencies and emerging.
Within the U.S., the relative strength continues to be in Financials and Technology, what I would consider to be the two most important sectors in America. Industrials and Transportation stocks look to rebound here as well. The weight of the evidence is suggesting that we want to be buying weakness in stocks, including the narrowing of credit spreads in the Bond Market and the outperformance from European and US Banks.
Here is the video in full where I lay out my best case for the coming weeks and months:
by JC
If you’ve been following along, I try and go out of my way to discuss risk management techniques, tools and signals when the market gives them to us. Whenever I lay out a thesis, I like to talk about what the market should look like in the case that we are correct, while at the same time outlining what the environment would look like if we are wrong. The idea is to picture both scenarios and as the data comes in, try to identify which outcome we’re in as quickly as possible.
Based on what we saw in some of the volatility related products this week, it’s clear someone got squeezed, or a bunch of someones. There was big money leaning in the other direction clearly. We’ve seen this sort of market behavior regularly – last April/May, then again in August. This was more extreme and most likely not the last time it happens. This is becoming normal. These leveraged products are a real risk when they all get squeezed simultaneously, there are forced liquidations. We saw elevated levels of volatility throughout the 90s and stocks kept rallying for years. So we can have volatility and rising stock prices at the same time. [Read more…]
by JC
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.
We’re now in February so, of course, we want to talk about what happened in January. I’ll have my friend Jeff Hirsch from Stock Traders Almanac on the podcast this week talking about the seasonal data that is so critical this time of year. But as far as price itself is concerned, we want to rip through all of the monthly charts like we do at the end of every month. I find it really helpful to not just look through the major U.S. and Global Indexes, but also individual sectors, stocks, commodities, currencies and intermarket relationships. We don’t have to look through all 6,000-7000 charts in our universe on monthly timeframes, but I do think a select group of charts should be reviewed consistently. [Read more…]
by JC
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.
On Monday, I shared the video of the first presentation I gave which was about my process. You can watch that here. In this next video, we take all of those tools and techniques I explained in Video 1 and apply them to the current market environment. Here you will see me walk through the top/down approach using current global and US markets. Then we’ll break things down to the individual sector & industries before finally isolating specific risk vs reward opportunities in individual stocks.
Here is the video in full: [Read more…]
