I'm fortunate to have a lot of smart friends who are experts on the stock market. In some cases they're traders, or portfolio managers, analysts, financial advisors and best-selling authors. I get to have incredibly insightful conversations with my friends and colleagues every single day. But I understand that most people don't.

So today I'd like to share a video of a conversation I had yesterday with New York City Trader Kim Sokoloff, and about half way through my buddy Joe Fahmy also joined the chat. We discussed process, we talked about a few trade ideas we liked and just had an overall good time catching up.

These are the conversations I'm having regularly. I hope this gives you some insight as to how much I get to learn from my friends:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

For the week ended Friday, June 12, 2020:

Every week we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Last week was a big one for the bears as most risk-assets sold off aggressively to end the week after a strong start.

Many major Indexes in both International and Domestic Equity Markets printed bearish island reversal patterns, most of which occurred at logical levels of overhead supply. Read our post about it here.

We also just wrote about how the market's secular leaders are holding up best since market internals peaked about two weeks ago. We're going to use our US Index and Sector tables below to highlight the noteworthy relative strength from these areas amid the recent market weakness.

Let's take it from the top and begin with our US Index ETF table.

There are no called strikes on Wall Street. In other words, we're not penalized for not swinging, like you are in baseball. We have the ability to be patient, to a certain extent at least, depending on your mandate. But most of us don't have mandates! Even one of the best hitters of all time struggled when he swung at bad pitches. In this video we compare Ted Williams' batting average when he swung at good pitches, vs when he swung at bad ones.

This is my favorite reminder that in trading & investing, we want to wait for OUR perfect pitch, and then swing, vs just swinging at anything. 

This explanation is taken directly from Lesson 5 in our NEW Allstarcharts Charting School:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

For the week ended Friday, June 5, 2020:

Every weekend we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

This was a big week for market bulls as a myriad of consolidations resolved to the upside while the powerhouse Nasdaq 100 $QQQ finally became the first major index to reclaim its all-time highs. The only assets to post negative returns this week were the usual "safe-havens" such as Treasuries, Yen, and Precious Metals. Everything else was green. How's that for improving risk-appetite?

In this post, we'll highlight that this broadening participation and flight towards risk-assets is more than just a one-week phenomenon. We've seen this type of price behavior in some asset classes for over a month now.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Thanks to everyone for participating in this week's Mystery Chart. It was a bit of a layup, as most of you were bullish, recognizing the powerful failed breakdown and follow-through back above critical former support.

We would agree and like this chart for a counter-trend move right now as well. But the reason we chose it was really for informational purposes, as we are seeing continuation patterns resolve higher all over the globe right now.

The more of these patterns that resolve to the upside, the stronger the weight of the evidence builds in favor of other consolidations working themselves out higher as well. We are seeing this across all areas of Domestic and International Equity Markets, many of which we'll highlight in this post.

Today I want to talk about how important it is to know what's inside the index funds you own. In many cases they can be misleading. Something like the Dollar Index, for example, which is basically 60% Euro, is not exactly the best barometer of the "U.S. Dollar". The Consumer Discretionary Index is 23% Amazon. Stocks like Google and Facebook aren't even in the Technology Index! Combined, $GOOG & $FB actually make up around 40% of the Communications Index.

It's important to know what you own, or what you're analyzing for that matter. When you talk about the S&P500, this is basically they greatest momentum strategy of all time. It buys more of the biggest and best performing stocks and kicks out the worst ones, replacing them with better performers. For me, this is the best large-cap momentum strategy ever created. 

Over the past few days, we've had traders and investors from all over the world go through our new Charting School. In case you missed it, I partnered up with a group of Emmy-award winning producers to put together what I think is the best course on Technical Analysis ever created!

I can say that with a straight face because these 6 hours of content are filled with lessons that I've had to learn the hard way over the past 2 decades, plus all of the knowledge I've picked up from the best Technical Analysts in the world, either in real life over the years or on my podcast that now has over 100 interviews.

We've had a lot of feedback so far from people taking the course. The one common denominator between all of them is, "It's Practical".

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

For the week ended Friday, May 29, 2020:

Every weekend we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

This was a special week as Friday marked the end of May which means fresh monthly candlestick data. Analyzing these long-term monthly charts every several weeks is a great exercise as it forces us to take a step back and identify the structural trends that are in place.

As such, this week’s theme is the continued outperformance over both the short and long-term from those areas sporting the strongest primary uptrends.

Tech $XLK is by far the best performing sector over the trailing year. It is also the 2nd best over the past month and quarter, behind Communications $XLC and Health Care $XLV, respectively. Not surprisingly, these same sectors are also the next best performers over the trailing year.

We often hear about Japanese Candlesticks? But what's the difference between a hollow candle and a filled one? What do these colors represent?

This explanation is taken directly from Lesson 1 from the Allstarcharts Charting School:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Sentiment has not been good for Chinese Equities with a handful of recent sanctions adding to the general uncertainty around China-US relations. For the most part, we're seeing this reflected in price as the Shanghai Composite and iShares China Large-Cap ETF (FXI) are trading at multi-month lows relative to the S&P 500.

Interestingly enough, the area being hit hardest with negative headlines is one of the few bright spots in China's market right now... Technology and Internet stocks.

In this post, we take a look at the improving relative strength from this group and offer trade ideas in some of its leading stocks.

Here is the ratio chart of the Kraneweb Chinese Internet ETF (KWEB) vs the S&P 500 (SPY) which we've been writing about since November.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

For the week ended Friday, May 22, 2020:

Every weekend we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

This week’s main theme is risk-on action from beaten-down areas which we'll highlight in our US Index and Factor ETF tables, below.

We're putting a lot of emphasis on risk-appetite measures right now in order to provide insight into how the recent rangebound activity in Equity and Bond markets is likely to resolve itself.

The most basic way to assess risk-tolerance is to compare the performance of risk-on vs risk-off assets. As such, this post will focus on how the offensive vs defensive areas of various markets are acting right now.

Click table to enlarge view.