I was down in New York City this week and dropped by the Nasdaq to chat with my old pal Frances Horodelski on BNN Bloomberg. Frances and I have been rapping about the markets for the better part of the past decade. It was great to chat with her once again.
In this short clip, we talk about the new bull market for stocks, rotation into Emerging Markets and Energy, where we think gold goes and how bad bonds are going to get hit if interest rates get to the 3% mark we're looking for in the US 10-year Yield.
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.
Before we get in to stocks and charts, I just want to thank you for your support all these years. It really means a lot to me. Today I noticed I had 61.8K followers on Twitter! How about that? Leonardo Fibonacci would be proud!
This was my first week back living on the east coast. My 2-year plan to be in California turned into 4.5 beautiful years in Sonoma Valley. This was after spending 15 years total in the northeast between college in Fairfield, CT and over a decade in New York City.
I keep getting asked, "But JC why would you ever go back???" (this is happening at least several times each day).
How quickly people forget what a beast Amazon has been for years. All it took was an 18-month consolidation for investors to fall out of love with one of the greatest stocks in American history.
The bet the bears are making is that Amazon has been lagging and dragging down the Consumer Discretionary sector, considering it's 22% weighting in the index $XLY. So if you believe this is a big market top, I understand why you would think Discretionaries are setting up for a big fall. I totally get that.
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:
Copper has been getting a lot of attention as it hits 5-month highs, but there is another Base Metal chart that's not being talked about.
Today we're looking at that chart and then taking a more comprehensive approach at what's going on in the space.
Here's Copper making 5-month highs as momentum attempts to get overbought. The record net long position held by commercial hedgers continues, suggesting they think Copper prices can still head higher despite a more than 10% rally from the July failed breakdown.
Click on chart to enlarge view.
Stronger Copper is a good thing for Emerging Markets and reflects market participants pricing in stronger economic growth conditions.
In this Episode of Allstarcharts Weekly, Steve and I discuss the less talked about tenets of Dow Theory. Everyone always likes to talk about the Dow Jones Industrial Average either confirming or diverging from the Dow Jones Transportation Average. But what gets forgotten is that there are many more tenets like Closing Prices are the most important, Identifying the direction of the Primary Trends and The Market Discounting Everything. Check out JC's 5 Most Important Dow Theory Tenets
This day and age we have other areas just as important, or even more important, than a group of Railroads, like what Charlie had when he first wrote down his Tenets in the late 1800s. Today we also compare the Dow Jones Industrial Average to the Semiconductor and Homebuilders Indexes as well as incorporate a series of ratios with Consumer Staples and Financials. It's more of an "and" than an "or" for us when it comes to Dow Theory.
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!
There is information everywhere. We analyze both the Indexes and the ETFs. We look at markets all over the world priced in both local currency and in US Dollars. We often use Gold as the denominator as well as the Indexes themselves to analyze relative strength. It's one big giant web of money flow.
Today I want to call your attention to an interesting divergence that has come at important turning points in the past. Specifically I'm referring to the Wisdom Tree Hedged Exchange Traded Funds for Europe and Japan: $HEDJ and $DXJ respectively. These funds are priced in local currencies as opposed to most other ETFs around the world that are priced in US Dollars.
First, here is the Europe Index Fund priced in Euro breaking out to all-time highs. I've been chuckling to myself a lot lately because when was the last time you could say the words "Europe" and "all-time" highs in the same sentence with a straight face?
