During the course of my day-to-day engagement with the markets and market participants, including subscribers to All Star Options, I'm often asked my thoughts about how I would manage some position that somebody is in. Usually goes something like this:
Sean, I've been in this inverted double reverse downward dog position and now I'm losing money. What should I do?
Ok, so I made up the name of the position, but you get my point. People do weird things and they are looking for help.
One commonality I get from people engaging with options is that they bought long-dated calls (sometimes Leaps) in stocks they are bullish on in lieu of buying stock. And they got lucky -- real lucky. So lucky in fact that they are sitting on enormous open profits on calls that are now WAY in the money.
Technology is the largest sector of the market from an indexing perspective, but it's also pervasive because it finds its ways into other sectors/industries and often plays a big role.
With that as our backdrop, it's clear why Technology's relative performance is an important barometer for the health of the market...and it's been quite good since breaking out to new highs in 2016.
So can it continue, or are we due for some TECHnical difficulties in the weeks and months ahead?
We look at a lot of intermarket relationships and try to analyze the same things, but from different perspectives. It's all part of the weight of the evidence approach that we so often preach. Today we're focusing in on the relative strength (or weakness) in Consumer Staples as a heads up for the next move in the US Stock Market.
Consumer Staples are funny bunch. Think about it like this: regardless of how bad the economy might get, as a society we're still going to brush our teeth, wash our dishes, smoke cigarettes and drink beers. Those are Consumer Staples. They tend to be less volatile and underperform when stocks in general are going higher, but outperform when stocks are selling off, for the same reasons.
Weekends are great to just take a step back and see what is actually going on. It's really easy to get caught up in the day to day noise. I talk about the power of Monthly Chart Reviews. This is a similar process, just done more frequently and timeframes are shorter-term. But the taking a step back part follows the same philosophy.
Here are a few things that I'm thinking about this weekend:
I've been in the camp that this 20-month consolidation in the U.S. Stock Market is just that, a consolidation within an ongoing uptrend that started in early 2016, or 2013, or even further back depending on who you ask. I already made my case.
When you factor in the global market conditions, which I've done here, this is an environment where I believe it's easier to get paid buying stocks, not selling them. That could certainly change. Energy could roll over again, Small-caps and Transports could lose their former lows and new downside leadership can emerge. While I think that is the lower probability outcome, it's always an important exercise to consider the other side.
Today we're making the bear case and presenting the evidence that most points to a bearish environment in Q4 and one where we're better off selling stocks, not buying them.
In this Episode of Allstarcharts Weekly, Steve and I talk about how the spike in Crude Oil earlier this week is impacting Energy Stocks. When we look specifically at the Oil & Gas Exploration & Production Index, prices broke down below the 2009 & 2016 lows, only to quickly reverse back above. We also saw this happen in the Oil Services Index. Prices of the $OIH broke below the 2001 lows only to get back above it swiftly. I think if we're above 24 in $XOP and 14 in $OIH, we want to err on the long side. If we are in fact seeing a mean reversion in Energy Stocks, I would image Crude Oil will most likely be flat to up in that environment. The levels are set, now let's see how this plays out!
We are back with another episode of The Money Game Podcast with Phil Pearlman. Today we talk about the inability for some people trade US stocks from the long side due to biases stemming from past experiences. This is a real thing that we see constantly. So we talk about the causes, being aware of these feelings and what can be done to overcome these hurdles. I'm lucky that I've been through enough bull market and bear market cycles to not get stuck into betting on just one side or the other. But some people have a real fear of admitting they're wrong and turning bullish at, what they think might be, precisely the wrong time. Some of this is driven by ego and some is just irrational anxiety. This is a really important conversation and one that I will likely listen to again several times over in the future.
Okay, having a play in mind for Kansas City Southern $KSU made the title of this post low hanging fruit. Captain Obvious, this guy.
Our boy JC here at All Star Charts went shopping this weekend and couldn't help catching a glimpse of the cover of this week's Barron's attempting to instill fear into the hearts of Railroad investors. He, like me, is a natural skeptic of headlines. So he dug into the sector and was not surprised to see price action telling a different story. One of the most compelling charts to me is the one for $KSU and I'm liking the route these tracks are headed.
We look at a lot of charts every week, so it's not surprising that we often come across charts that look "too simple."
A setup we've seen thousands of times or a trend that's reaffirmed itself time and time again, yet I always find myself being skeptical of a chart that looks textbook in nature.
Today I want to take a look at one of those charts.
For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it's a custom index or inverted, who knows!
We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.
You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now.Buy,Sell, or Do Nothing?
