From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to this exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe... on an absolute or relative basis.

Maybe it’s a custom index or price is inverted, who knows!

We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with the asset in order to take a view based solely on price behavior.

You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now.

So let us know what it is... Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

In last week's report, we played "devil's advocate" and laid out some of the more bearish developments we could find out there.

But all-in-all, the market is still providing bears less room to make a sound argument. We continue to find that any bearish evidence is primarily isolated to shorter timeframes... and even then, still overwhelmed by the abundance of bullish data points.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

In a post last month JC discussed the recent strength in Commodities and posed the following question...

If the CRB Index is above its 2016 lows and Crude Oil is above all those former lows from the past decade, how can we be bearish commodities?

Over the last few quarters, we've seen more and more intermarket relationships make a significant shift in favor of risk-assets.

Many are showing early signs of a structural reversal and others simply accelerating in the direction of their underlying trend.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to this exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it’s a custom index or inverted, who knows!

We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.

You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

As we discussed in our latest report, bears are running out of any substantial fuel to support their position.

And despite the arrival of some long-awaited selling pressure last week, that absolutely remains the case.

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Call me a young naïve trader drunk on a bull market, but I don't think it's necessary in today's world to blow up in order to learn.

Hear me out.

Back in the '90s and early 2000s, you read a book and experimented with your account through trial and error. But today, we have widespread democratization of financial information that just wasn't around back then.

Given that this new generation of traders have endless routes of online resources and a completely transformed avenue of education, I don't think there's any real need for that.

Those who've been cynical on this trend have been dead wrong.

Retail has been the big winner.

The hedge funds got Tesla wrong. When TSLA didn't meet their standardized Wall Street mold, they didn't give a second look and proceeded to miss one of the best trades of the last few years.

And what about Bitcoin? It was retail that got to the party early on that one, too. For a symbolic change, you had the institutions chasing retail, not the other way around.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

The market is giving us absolutely no reason to play defense right now.

Regardless of the asset class, it's the risk-takers that are having their way in this environment.

Investors stretching out along the risk spectrum is a point we've been hammering home for some time now, particularly in our weekly RPP Reports - like this one.

Not only is this true on absolute terms, but we're also witnessing cross-asset relationships progress higher and in favor of risk-asset which can only be taken as a positive.

It's not often we see all asset classes in agreement with each other, but when we do, it's a significant driving force that supports the risk-on trade and suggests higher prices to come.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Last week's Mystery Chart was the Israeli Tel Aviv 125 Index zoomed all the way back to the start of this century.

You might be wondering why we're discussing Israeli equities of all things...

The short answer: They're making new all-time highs.

In this post, we explore the sector that is mainly responsible for these gains, dive into its strongest components, and outline some long ideas with risk/reward setups skewed in our favor.

Not only is this yet another group of stocks we can use to express our bullish thesis on risk assets -- it is also excellent information. Once again, we're seeing another development pointing to the increasing participation and improving breadth across international equity markets.

This move in Israeli equities also fits into a larger theme that is taking place beneath the surface for stocks all around the world. It's difficult to overstate the significance of these moves.

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

This is an issue that pretty much everyone encounters at some time or another...

Overcomplicating correlations.

I'm going to share a few recent examples, and then discuss how overthinking these relationships could potentially end in a world of hurt.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to this exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it’s a custom index or inverted, who knows!

We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.

You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

As we mentioned last week, the weight of the evidence overwhelmingly lies in favor of the bulls.

We're seeing rotation supporting this move higher in equities; a sustained bid for SMIDs and Micro-Caps while Large-Cap indexes slowly work higher is all very constructive for the early innings of bull markets.

This environment is also providing bulls with an increasingly wide selection of areas to allocate capital - from Industrials, Technology, and Cylicals, and now Financials.

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

I'm very new to this whole thing.

I only began trading, charting, and researching just a few short years ago - so it's only natural I become victim to some rookie mistakes.

Seeing my trading account up by a decent margin has given me this attitude that I'm some wonder kid, and that I've somehow cracked the puzzle only being a teenager.

But this couldn't be further from the truth.

If this rally has got you thinking you're a superstar, consider that 87%, a near-record high, of the Russell 3000 have outperformed the broader market in the last 3 months. That's right, 87%.

Assuming you've held stocks over this period, statistically speaking, it has actually been more difficult to underperform the S&P 500 than it has been to outperform.