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:

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...

U.S. Treasury Bonds have gotten absolutely destroyed, particularly on the shorter end of the curve. With interest rates exploding higher, money has been flowing beautifully out of the bond market. We're obviously happy to see that. It took a little longer to get going than we originally wanted it to, but we got there. So now the reevaluation process is upon us.

Today I want to talk about what we want to do here with respect to Bonds and Interest Rates and what some of our options might be. 

Long Precious Metals has been a big theme for us this year. I still think this is an area we need to be involved with and the weight-of-the-evidence is suggesting higher prices for the entire space.

Today I want to point out the recent breakout in Swiss Franc Futures. Historically there is a high positive correlation between this contract and the price of Gold. As we break out to new multi-year highs in Swissy, Gold looks likely to follow along:

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...

The bond market is the biggest market in the world. Hello?

It's easy to get caught up in the daily noise about some crypto currency or a biotech stock. But these are tiny tiny tiny itsy bitsy little markets. The bond market is a real market, with actual money in it and driven by the largest financial institutions and governments all over the world. If you want real information, the bond market is where to get it.

My friend Larry McDonald, a former Lehman Brothers Bond Trader, was on a recent podcast episode of Technical Analysis Radio talking about exactly this. I encourage you to give it a listen, it's not long.

Today we're taking a look at credit spreads. Why? Because we're always watching them. In November when some people were freaking out about the sell-off in bonds,...

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...

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...

One of the things that often gets underrated is the power of simplicity. What's wrong with only looking at price and focusing in only on what matters most? I get that you love your moving averages and candlesticks and all sorts of momentum indicators. But the most important indicator is still price. So that's what we're going to look at today using OHLC Bar Charts.

One thing that often gets forgotten is that we don't live in a vacuum. Life in the market is not just about absolute performance, but about how assets behave relative to their peers. The stock market isn't the biggest game in town, it's the bond market. But let's not forget about metals either. When stocks are in bull markets, they're not just going up as a group, they are also outperforming the alternatives.

Today we're taking a look at stocks, not just on their own, but relative to the other assets. We know that on their own stocks are making new all-time highs. This is happening all over the world. Stocks in the U.S. aren't up because of what's happening in New York or Washington DC. Stocks in the U.S. are up because stocks all over the world are going up, both in developed and emerging markets, despite of what is happening in New York and Washington DC.

Some people have this misconception that stocks are in the later innings of this uptrend. I've been arguing, almost religiously, that they are probably much closer to the beginning of the bull market than near the end. So no, this is not the 9th year of a bull market, I think we're probably early in...