From the desks of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

In this post, we're going to share 10 of the most important charts we're looking at right now. Some are merely for observational purposes or to highlight some of the broader trends at play in the markets while others are trade ideas in some of our favorite names and areas.

Let's dive right in. Here they are.

When the picture isn't clear on the timeframe you're trading, it generally helps to zoom out one, or even two timeframes above it to gain some clarity around the primary trend.

Today we're going to compare and contrast the action in Gold/Silver and Natural Gas/Crude Oil to highlight this exact concept.

When we talk about "Precious Metals", it can mean a lot of things. You've got the metals like Gold and Silver, which are behave very differently at times, and you have the stocks with all sorts of market capitalizations. There are a lot of ways to describe the precious metals space, so let's get into a little bit of that today.

Here is a chart of what this group looks like this year. Notice the outperformance from the Gold Miners Index Fund, almost twice the performance of the metal itself. The little guys and silver in general didn't perform nearly as well:

Click on Charts to Zoom In

Jeff deGraaf is one of those analysts who influenced me very early on. Something I've always admired about him is how much emphasis he puts on first identifying what type of market environment we're in, before then giving more or less weight to different tools and indicators. This is one of those important steps that I think gets forgotten quite often when you see investors trying to always incorporate a certain strategy or approach regardless of the environment. In this episode, Jeff compares this stock market crash, and subsequent recovery, to others in the past including 1987. He does a nice job of incorporating what is currently taking place in Bonds and Gold into his analysis for stocks. I think there are a lot of great lessons in this conversation with, who I believe, is one of the best Technical Analysts in the world today.

The best part about the end of the month is that there's always a fresh batch of Monthly Charts waiting for us. We only perform this exercise once the candlesticks are completed, which in this case was Thursday April 30th. It takes me about half an hour to get through them all, which represents roughly 6 hours of my entire year's work. I promise you from the bottom of my heart that there is no single part of my entire process that I find more helpful than this monthly chart review.

You see, this process forces us to take a step back, and gives us no choice but to identify the direction of the primary trends. We use these to put shorter-term trends into context. So no matter what your timeframe is, I think first identifying primary trends, and then working our way down from there, is a huge advantage over a blind bottoms/up approach.

Here are the things that stood out most during my review:

When analyzing the Gold Mining Sector, I can't help but think about the 1993 movie Dazed & Confused. One of the more popular lines in the film is the perfect way to explain what is currently happening in today's market.

In this scene Matthew McConaughey's character is telling a couple of kids,

You heard about the party being busted right? Not to worry. There is a new fiesta in the making as we speak. It's at the moon tower. Full kegs. Everybody's gonna be there. You oughta go...."

We're all stuck at home these days and Zoom is how we get to hang out with friends and family.

This week I was chatting with my pal Jeremy over in Laguna Beach about Gold, Silver and Gold Mining Stocks.

I think there are some good opportunities in the space and I think there are areas in which to be patient.

Here's a short video of our discussion:

We've been talking a lot about our expectations for continued volatility and what conditions we'd need to be bullish stocks again.

In this post, we want to step back and see what some of the longer-term weekly and monthly charts are suggesting for stocks and the other major asset classes.

Here's the Nifty 50 which spent the last two years grinding slightly higher as momentum diverged negatively. So far this year, prices have fallen 40% and retraced 38.2% of their entire 2001-2019 rally...in three months. From a risk management perspective, bulls need to see 8,000 hold in the Nifty 50 or there is further downside risk towards 6,200.

Click on chart to enlarge view. 

The trend for stocks is down. When they do rally, they scream dead-cat bounce. And bonds keep going out at new all-time highs every week. Gold is at its highest prices in 7 years and Interest rates are in free-fall along with bank stocks. What type of environment does this appear like to you? Is it the kind of market where we want to be buying stocks aggressively, or is this the type of market where we want to be smaller, cash heavy and more defensive?

Let's try to figure it out together.

First of all, Industrials historically have the highest correlation with the S&P500 of all the S&P Sectors. This is what that group currently looks like. One of our most basic technical principles is that former support turns into resistance. We call that Polarity. You can see this taking place in this sector index:

Chart Summit 2020 is officially in the books. What an amazing time we had. Wow!

The videos of all the presentations are now up and you can go to ChartSummit.com and stream them for FREE!

There has been a lot of risk in the stock market over the past 2 months and that still has not changed. Things are getting worse, not better. I tried to emphasize in this week's Live Call that we have NOT seen any evidence to suggest that the worst of the selling is behind us.

We've been inundated with emails from Financial Advisors and traders all over the world. From New York to London, South Africa, Malaysia, Laguna Beach they keep coming in. We work really hard and it is so nice to see how much we've been able to help people, both pros and every day hard working individuals. Thank you from all of us at Allstarcharts! We don't take these notes for granted even for a second.

We know times are tough for some people right now. I have friends and family that lost their jobs today. I'm seeing it outside of markets.

In this type of environment, our focus has been on capital preservation as opposed to capital appreciation.

We've gotten a lot of questions about Metals during this time, so this post will review why we've been out and what would get us involved again.