The US Dollar Index is approaching its Q4 highs once again, however, the real story lies underneath the surface in three unrepresented currency pairs that are offering a solid reward/risk opportunity at current levels.
The latest Chart of the Week is actually 4 charts! Today we're looking at Emerging Markets and comparing them to the S&P500. When money managers are bullish and positioning themselves for higher stock prices, they tend to invest in more speculative, higher beta names. When PMs are positioning themselves for lower stock prices, EM gets killed, particularly relative to developed markets.
These 4 charts represent divergences between Emerging markets and the S&P500 over the past couple of decades. When the S&P500 is making lower lows but Emerging Markets are simultaneously making higher lows, it's been evidence of risk appetite for stocks and markets have continued to rally for years after the divergence.
These are the registration details for the monthly conference call held for Premium Members of All Star Charts. In this call we will discuss the global market environment and how to profit from it. As always, this will include Stocks, Interest Rates, Commodities and Currencies. The video of the call will be archived in the members section to re-watch any time and the PDF of the charts will be made available as well.
This month’s Conference Call will be held on Tuesday February 19th at 7PM ET. Here are the details for the call:
When it comes to buying stocks, I'm a bigger fan of buying things that are already working rather than getting cute and trying to be the first one in hoping others agree with me quickly. Rarely does bottom fishing work out in our favor. The probabilities are against us from the start.
One way to see if something is already "working" is to recognize how it is behaving compared to its peers. In the case of U.S. Stocks, how are specific groups doing compared to the rest of the market? I like to think of it like holding a basketball in a pool under water. You can feel the pressure, similar to overall selling pressure in stocks. Once you let go, the ball explodes out of the water and into the air. Stocks behave the same way once the overwhelming selling is complete.
Today's chart of the week outlines a breakout in the Cybersecurity ETF HACK relative to the S&P 500. In this post we'll discuss which indiivudal names are offering the best reward/risk opportunity.
The iShares Real Estate ETF IYR is up more than 17% from its Christmas Eve lows and sitting just off all-time highs. Can this rally continue and if so, what are the names we want to be buying to take advantage of this theme?
We'll provide our perspective on those questions in this post.
You guys who know me already know that this is my favorite exercise of them all. We only do this 12 times a year. Let's just say that it takes you an hour, if you really want to take your time, that's 12 hours of your entire year. Think about the amount of time you spend each year performing other analysis. As far as I'm concerned, it's not even close. These 6 hours (for me it's 6) are easily the most valuable 6 hours I spend all year analyzing markets.
This process allows us to take a step back, which forces us to identify the direction of the primary trend. It's impossible not to, especially when you're seeing similar themes across Indexes, sectors and asset classes.
There is a reason why Medical Equipment stocks look like Tech stocks and not the rest of Healthcare. They're essentially tech stocks trapped in the body of a healthcare stock. Although they are indeed in the Healthcare space, we need to recognize how they behave, the relative strength vs their peers and then treat them as their own group.
In case you missed it, Medical Equipment stocks went out yesterday at their highest weekly close relative to the S&P500 EVER. This is not evidence of a downtrend or any kind of weakness. Quite the opposite in fact:
When you hear people talking about Dow Theory, it usually revolves around what the Dow Industrials and Transports are doing and whether they are diverging or confirming one another. I want to be perfectly clear that while this is certainly one of Charles Dow's tenets from the late 1800s, this is just one of many, and not even in the top 5, as far as I'm concerned. I encourage you to check out my post: Everything About Dow Theory.
Today, we are indeed going to focus on the behavior of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Dow Jones Transportation Average. Earlier this week we discussed the Dow Jones Composite, which includes the 15 stocks in the Dow Utility Index as well. For this conversation we're analyzing just the Industrials and Transports.
There are many ways to gauge the strength or weakness of the U.S. Stock Market. For us, there isn't a single "best way" to do it. The advantage we have is that we just analyze all of them. There are over 50 charts in my U.S. Stock Market Indexes workbook alone.
But today I want to focus on an interesting chart that I don't think gets the credit it deserves: The Dow Jones Composite Index. I really like how it represents all of the stocks in the 3 major Dow Jones Indexes: Industrials, Transportation and Utilities. If you want a broad measure of the most important stocks in America, I think this is it.
Picking tops and bottoms in the market is really hard. Some people claim they can do it and we'll let them. It's those types of people who help create the arbitrage between the aware and the unaware.
Markets are rarely ever putting in a top or a bottom. Most of the time they're just somewhere in the middle. For years I've told my friend Josh that his best blog post ever was one from 2012 which he titled, "Tops, Bottoms and Middles".
