From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Last week I sat down with Justine Underhill for Real Vision's "Trade Ideas" show to discuss a tactical trading opportunity in Palladium and a longer-term play in the Insurance industry.

These are themes I've shared with our Institutional Clients over the last few weeks. I hope you find some value in them.

Paul Ciana and I go way back to 2006 when him and I were studying for the CMT exams together. Today, Paul is the Chief FICC Technical Strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research. In English, that means everything outside of equities. It's nice to see your friends succeed and watching him crush it is definitely one for the good guys.

Yesterday we got new Monthly Candlesticks, so this post will outline a few of the major changes since last month.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

With another potential failed breakout in the US Dollar setting up, here's the metals trade we're putting on.

Interest Rates in the United States hit new 52-week lows last month. But from the looks of it, the commodities market and stock market are not in agreement with that direction. It's when we see divergences among asset classes that it gets my attention.

Today we're looking at the divergences between stocks, bonds and commodities that I believe are pointing to higher rates this quarter. If we're going to take the weight-of-the-evidence approach, it's 2 to 1 in favor of rising interest rates. 

One of my good college buddies always busts my chops because he thinks it's ridiculous that look at charts all day. Today he calls me about some other stuff, but randomly asked what was my favorite chart. I'm like, "...of all time or right now?". He said right now, what's my favorite chart?

It got me thinking. But my first reaction was the SPX/CRB chart. This is one of the most fascinating situations in the world today.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Rotation into Energy stocks continues to pick up. While the reward/risk opportunities at the sector/subsector ETF level aren't great, there are several attractive setups within individual stocks.

In this post I'm going to point out seven names within Energy ETFs XLE, XOP, OIH, AMLP, CRAK, and FCG with extremely well-defined risk and skewed reward/risk at current levels.

Half are buying strength (higher probability, but lower reward/risk) and the others are mean-reversion setups (lower probability, but higher reward/risk). Pick your poison.

What inflation?

This seems to be the talk of the town these days.

Interest rates all over the world made new lows last month and have since then tried to start a recovery. We're seeing this across the developed world in the U.S., Germany, UK and Japan, among others. Meanwhile, journalists at Bloomberg Business Week decided to put a dead dinosaur on the cover of the latest issue asking, "Is Inflation Dead?"

This week on the podcast we have the pleasure of chatting with Craig Johnson, Chief Market Technician at Piper Jaffray. I've known Craig for a long time and love the work that he puts out. During the day he speaks to buy side clients all over the world. As a past president of the CMT Association, he has surrounded himself with some of the best minds in the history of technical analysis. His perspective based on who he speaks to and his experiences throughout his career make me want to listen when he has something to say. In this conversation we discuss the rest of the year for U.S. stocks and sectors. There's a part in this episode that focuses on breadth and what we're both looking for moving forward. Inflation, or lack thereof, is something he's watching, so we talk about Gold, Oil and other inflationary factors that could impact stocks and bonds. We covered a lot. I really enjoyed this one!

Most of the Commodities and Currencies we track continue to lack a long-term trend, but I want to outline a few charts in the space that are notable right now.