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. 

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!

It's been a frustrating period for stocks in Canada over the past decade. Up just 7% since their 2008 highs, Canadian equities have been consistently underperforming for almost 10 years. But are things now finally changing?

With a new month comes a fresh batch of Monthly Candlesticks. As you are all well aware, I find this exercise to be incredibly valuable. It forces us to identify the direction of the primary trend.

Chart Summit was a "Ski during the day and Chart at night" event held on February 22-23, 2019 in Breckenridge, CO. I co-hosted it with Brian Shannon and this is the video of my presentation:

The Top/Down Approach to Financial Markets using Technical Analysis

If there is any group out there that is feeling the frustration, it's the gold bug community. Gold is at the same price today that it was a year ago, 5 years ago and 8 years ago. During that time frame, the S&P500 has more than doubled. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up more that 14,000 points, again more than doubling during this period.

Even U.S. Treasury Bonds made money as interest rates collapsed. The bond ETF $TLT was up over 60% before retracing some of that over the past couple of years. But still, up substantially and clearly outperforming precious metals.

You could have literally been in anything other than these commodities and made money. But from epic frustration comes secular periods for profit. I think this is what we have here:

I'm in Vancouver for a few days. While I'm here, I need to meet with Gold Bugs and ski Whistler. That's what you do around here right? I'm good with both.

It's hard to have a serious conversation with the true yellow metal cult followers. These clowns are bullish at all times and have been expecting Gold to make a huge move every day since their last big move that ended in 2011. "This is it", I've been hearing for years. But Nope. Not only have they not made any money, but the opportunity cost (what else could they have done with that cash) is through the roof. It's been painful to watch them.

For our purposes, open minded investors, in other words, we don't care if Gold doubles or goes to zero. We could not care less. Our jobs aren't dependent on them. Our "investment strategy" is not tied to rising prices for precious metals and since we don't have "a narrative", we don't need to make things up to justify our existence.

Tuesday I posted a mystery chart and asked you all to let me know what you would do. Buy, sell, or do nothing. Most of you agreed with me it looked like a structural breakdown that we should be selling as long as prices are below support.

So today I want to reveal the full chart and share why I feel it's relevant.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Short-term strength in Precious Metals continues, so I want to do an in-depth analysis of the space like I did last August to see if we're now entering "The Golden Age of Precious Metals".

One chart that I think sums up how I feel about Precious Metals is an equally-weighted index of Gold, Silver, Platinum, and Palladium. While no longer in a long-term downtrend, it's not in an uptrend either. All that can be said is that it's testing the top of a multi-year range. Not all that exciting.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

This is one of my favorite things to do: Forget everything that happened this quarter and this year and start from scratch. It doesn't matter what we did or how we felt in 2018. It's irrelevant. We're moving forward. This is my Q1 2019 Playbook.