Howard Lindzon has always been there for me. He is the founder of Stocktwits, who originally built Allstarcharts.com back in 2010 and welcomed me into their network of bloggers. Many of these are still around today and doing better than ever!
Chart Summit was a "Ski during the day and Chart at night" event held on February 22-23, 2019 in Breckenridge, CO. I co-hosted it with Brian Shannon and this is the video of my presentation:
The Top/Down Approach to Financial Markets using Technical Analysis
If there is any group out there that is feeling the frustration, it's the gold bug community. Gold is at the same price today that it was a year ago, 5 years ago and 8 years ago. During that time frame, the S&P500 has more than doubled. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up more that 14,000 points, again more than doubling during this period.
Even U.S. Treasury Bonds made money as interest rates collapsed. The bond ETF $TLT was up over 60% before retracing some of that over the past couple of years. But still, up substantially and clearly outperforming precious metals.
You could have literally been in anything other than these commodities and made money. But from epic frustration comes secular periods for profit. I think this is what we have here:
The noisemakers love to talk to you about something they like to call FANG, or FAANG or FAAMG. I think they change it each time, depending on which narrative their trying to pass along to the unaware. They're here to make noise, we're only here to make money. See the difference?
What you will hear every day, if you choose to subject yourself to their crap, is that Google and Amazon are only up 6% this year. What you won't hear is that the Equally-weighted Technology Index just broke out to new all-time highs relative to the traditional Market Cap-Weighted Technology Index.
Chart Summit 2019 is in the books. This is the first time I've ever hosted a live financial conference. The last 2 Chart Summits were 100% virtual. I'm not exactly a "conference thrower" and neither is my co-host Brian Shannon. But somehow everything worked out and we had an incredible few days up in beautiful Breckenridge Colorado!
Brian and I love skiing and analyzing charts. As it turns out, there are a lot of other people like that too! I'd like to thank everyone who attended our event. It would not have been possible without you!
Every month I host a conference call for Premium Members of Allstarcharts. By now I think you've noticed that we're really increasing the content on our YouTube Channel, so I thought it would add some value to include some of the highlights from this month's call.
It's an hour long video call and about 150 charts, but here are a few things that stood out this month:
A weakening US Dollar has been a positive catalyst for Stocks
Freeport McMoRan is a good example of the types of stocks benefiting from Dollar Weakness, on both a relative and absolute basis
London FTSE100 breaking out of a multi-decade base makes it hard to be bearish stocks from any sort of intermediate-term perspective
Our "Dow Fab 5" is breaking out to All-time highs
Crude Oil is beginning its next leg higher, which makes sense with stock prices rising as well
Yesterday we posted a mystery chart and asked you all to let us know what you would do. Buy, sell, or do nothing?
The responses seemed pretty unanimous, suggesting selling at current levels...and one of you even guessed what it was! Maybe we're making these too easy.
Anyway, we agree with that bearish bias, but were posting to see what other viewpoints might be out there. I guess we got our answer.
Let's get into the real chart and why we feel it's relevant.
With nearly 55 days until April expiration, this is the time I start looking at index and sector ETF’s for possibilities in selling delta-neutral income spreads.
This is an exercise I do every month where I analyze the current volatility priced into each of the most liquid optionable ETFs and measure where each ETF sits within its most recent 90 day trading range.
Well, this afternoon as I went through my monthly analysis, it was determined that out of all of the major ETFs that I follow not a single one offered appealing volatility to sell into and each ETF was trading near the upper or lower end of its most recent trading range. This tells me that ETFs are continuing to trend -- and a trend is not your friend when you are a delta neutral premium seller.
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?
When it comes to market breadth, the Advance-Decline line is definitely one of our go-to's. This indicator calculates the net advancers. In other words, the number of advancing stocks less the number of declining stocks. This cumulative measure goes up and down over time, similar to the market indexes themselves.
Something to keep in mind is the fact that we use the Common Stocks Only A-D Line because there are other vehicles that trade on the NYSE, like closed-end funds for example. If we're analyzing the stock market, let's stick to just stocks in our indicators.
This is week is Chart Summit 2019 in Breckenridge Colorado!
We're skiing during the day and charting at night! We have skiers and snowboarders coming from all over the world to this unique event. We've even organized snow mobile tours for those who choose not to ride with us on the slopes. Everyone is welcome!
The full schedule has been released. Check it out!
