In my opinion, the reason people have been so bearish towards stocks and fighting strong trends is because they're allowing other biases influence their decision making. Whether they don't agree with the Fed, or the Trump, the direction of the Economy, or whatever it is, they're choosing to give more weight to these "opinions" than they do to price itself.

Fortunately for us, we're 100% data driven. So we don't care who the president is. We ignore everything the fed says and does. We assume anything a journalists creates is gossip, whether it is or isn't. And we certainly don't have time to care what the economy is doing.

So because we are so trained to focus on actual data, it's a lot easier for us to ignore those whose job it is to distract us. It's not "easy", but it's definitely easier for us as technicians than it is for most of society. The fact is most people are unaware, or choose not to care, that they're consuming content produced by those with ulterior motives. They're just here to sell ads to their sponsors while we're only trying to make money in the market. It's a big difference, and it becomes a problem.

So what we do is try to...

It's been a while since we've issued a Precious Metals update, so today we wanted to reiterate our risk management levels and targets on both the weekly and daily timeframes.

People don't like it when I tell them we're near the beginning of a new bull market in stocks. For some reason, they prefer that cozy feeling of going to bed thinking stocks are near an important high, and they've somehow outsmarted the system by selling stocks in uptrends instead of buying them.

I'm convinced some of these people must be looking at their charts upside down.

Anyway, let's take a look at the markets so I can show you why I think we're closer to the beginning of a new bull market and not near the end of an old one:

Neil Blalock is my guest this week on the podcast. I believe he is absolutely the perfect compliment to all of the other guests we've had on over the years. While many technical analysis, especially on this podcast, come from an equities background, Neil was raised in Missouri and brought up with commodities all around him. It wasn't until much later in his career that he focused more on the stock market. Because Technical Analysis can be applied to asset classes of all kinds, Neil is able to use his expertise across markets. What's funny is that you can take Neil out of the farm, but you can't take the farm away from him completely. When I asked him about what interests him out there, he went right for the Soybean Markets! Neil just can't help himself and it's a beauty to watch. In this episode we dive into the agriculture commodities market as well as the softs, precious metals and ultimately into the equities and interest rate markets. This was a really fun conversation with a different perspective than what you might be used to!

In this Episode of Allstarcharts Weekly, Steve and I talk about why we want to keep selling gold and buy stocks instead. This trade is working and we don't want to fight it. This has been our base case for months, as you can see here. One of the things that we want to incorporate into our study of price is the positioning of Commercial Hedgers and Speculators, which is published weekly by the CFTC in the Commitment of Traders Report.

In this video I explain how we use this data, why we care, and when to pay attention!

Let's take a step back and talk about what a huge waste of money I think it is to own gold. It's not just that I don't think it goes up in value, it's more about what else we could be doing with that money. It's the opportunity cost here that I believe burns the hole in your pocket. Will our money be treated better in rocks or in stocks? I still think it's in stocks.

In early October, I put out a note reiterating why we wanted to be selling gold. This is after over a year of a bullish approach towards the yellow metal. So to be clear, I am not a gold bug or a gold hater. The truth is that I couldn't care less whether gold doubles in price or gets cut in half. It's not my problem. For me, Gold is just another asset in a humongous world of many assets. If you think it's anything more than that, I believe you've already lost.

As a reminder, a big reason why we were so bullish of Gold throughout the 4th quarter last year and beyond was because Commercial Hedgers had on their largest net long position in history. Commercial hedgers in...

I was in Las Vegas this past week for a bunch of meetings and conferences. There was a lot going on in that city. There were traders and analysts at every hotel on the strip. It was really cool to see old friends and, of course, meet new ones. I personally found myself in a half dozen hotels arguing about markets and seeing a bunch of live music. Check out this video I shot at the Santana show at Mandalay Bay.

On Thursday afternoon I was hanging out at Bally's with David Keller talking about Stocks, Bonds, Gold, Copper, Sector Rotation, Market Breadth, Sentiment and the current market conditions. This one was short and sweet but we covered a lot:

When stocks are in strong uptrends, they tend to not only do well on an absolute basis, but they outperform their alternatives as well. Two obvious ones are Gold and Bonds.

So if stocks are going to fall hard, like so many people keep telling me, we are likely to see a bid in Precious Metals and US Treasury Bonds. As it turns out, however, we've only seen the exact opposite - bonds and metals struggling below overhead supply.

Back in August I made the case that if stocks were going much higher, as we thought they would, then the S&P500 will hold support at the late December lows relative to both Gold and Bonds. You can watch that short video here. This is what that chart looks like now:

In this Episode of Allstarcharts Weekly, Steve and I talk about all of the new highs we're seeing on both Weekly and Monthly charts. We've been pointing to the improvements in market breadth in recent months and how we've been getting an expansion in positive participation, not a contraction. This week we started to finally see this work its way into the weekly and monthly charts, but that doesn't change anything we didn't already know. We continue with the breadth discussion by pointing out that the world doesn't start and end with the 52-week highs list. We're seeing breadth improvements in the 21-day high and 13-week high lists and I'm in the camp that we'll ultimately see that reflected on the 52-week high list as well. It's a process, remember:

This week I sat down with Pearlman to talk about the fact that stocks are making new highs but the amount of bulls betting on higher prices is near now lows. It was a really interesting conversation so make sure to check it out.

At the end of our chat Phil asked me about some comments I made recently regarding the CCI Commodities Index.

Here is the chart he was referring to where Commodities are doing something they haven't done in 8 years. I think it's worth pointing out for sure:

Robert Sluymer has been a Technical Analyst for close to 3 decades. I really enjoy his intermarket, global macro perspective and the way he brings it all together in a similar way to what we do at our shop. It was hard for me to really disagree with anything Rob said during this podcast episode. It seems to me like him and I are on the same page on many levels. I didn't make it easy...