Sean and I have known each other for over a decade but there are still things he's interested in learning about my experiences. In this video, Sean asks me how playing baseball made me a better trader or investor. The key takeaways here are:

1) Hard Work and Mental Toughness

2) Preparation and knowing what you will do under any circumstance

3) Learning how to lose. If you fail 70% of the time on the diamond, you get inducted into the Hall of Fame.

Being able to take a loss and move on is part of the path to success.

Everyone these days is talking about yield curves inverting. It's the topic du jour, similar to things like golden crosses and 200 day moving averages. The difference is that this one is more intermarket oriented. "Well if this happens to bonds and that happens to rates, then this historically happens to stocks, or the economy". Observing the behavior of one asset class to help make decisions on another is called Intermarket Analysis, or "Cross-Asset" in some more institutional circles.

I don't think there is much more for me to say at this point about the yield curve. The crew over at The Chart Report pretty much covered it all beautifully last week. The short end of the curve (10-year minus 3-month) turned negative, but the long end of the curve did not. The 10s-30s spread is steepening and controlled by free markets vs the fed controlled short end. We've seen this happen before, like in the 90s for example, without it sparking bear markets. 

This is going to be a quick post looking at the potential failed breakdown that can lead to Reliance Communications doubling in a few months.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Friday afternoons are my favorite time of the week, but not for the reason most people would think.

Do you live on the East coast and ever wonder what it would be like to be a trader on the West coast? Could you handle working on a much different schedule? In today's video, we chat with my pal Mehmet Gunay who I met during his time at SMB Capital when I lived in New York City. Today, he lives in San Francisco and seems to have adjusted pretty well to the time change and lifestyle. I would have to agree with him. I enjoy the west coast hours much better than when I lived in New York. The ability to do things after work with plenty of sun light left is very appealing.

We might be in a rangebound market for stocks, but one thing is for sure: the trend for Technical Analysis is up.

I've had a front row seat to the growth of this discipline and its practitioners for the past 15 years, since first starting my journey. I was half way through John Murphy's Technical Analysis of Financial Markets when I knew this was for me. Things only became more clear after that. As I read through Edwards & Magee and many other books, the way markets behaved just started making more and more sense.

When most of us think of bank stocks, we're generally not saying positive things. We have a bad taste in our mouth, particularly since early last year. But that's not the case in India.

Look at this chart. Which one is different?

The cool thing about working with smart people is being able to learn from them. Having Sean McLaughlin on our team has made everyone better, not just our clients but us as well. In today's video, we tackle the question of when it makes more sense to finance an options position by selling a different contract to collect the income vs simply just buying calls or puts. As usual, Sean does a nice job of explaining this in a way that anyone could understand.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Today there is no shortage of information: Social Media, Blogs, Newspapers, Television, Water-Cooler Gossip, etc., but we still have the same amount of time in a day. We all have to make a decision what we're going to pay attention to and what we're not.

Here's the video from a live interview I did on ET NOW, India's leading business news channel. It's amazing that I could not live further away than I currently do, yet we can still do this sort of thing. Their morning TV is my evening, but it works.

In this interview we discuss the ongoing rangebound market in US Stocks and then we shift gears to India's stock market. We talk about the rotation into small & mid-caps, key levels for both the NIFTY50 and Bank NIFTY as well as the relative strength we're seeing in the bank stocks, particularly ICICI and AXIS Bank.

Here is the video in full: