Everyone these days is talking about yield curves inverting. It's the topic du jour, similar to things like golden crosses and 200 day moving averages. The difference is that this one is more intermarket oriented. "Well if this happens to bonds and that happens to rates, then this historically happens to stocks, or the economy". Observing the behavior of one asset class to help make decisions on another is called Intermarket Analysis, or "Cross-Asset" in some more institutional circles.

I don't think there is much more for me to say at this point about the yield curve. The crew over at The Chart Report pretty much covered it all beautifully last week. The short end of the curve (10-year minus 3-month) turned negative, but the long end of the curve did not. The 10s-30s spread is steepening and controlled by free markets vs the fed controlled short end. We've seen this happen before, like in the 90s for example, without it sparking bear markets. 

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

During last week's Conference Call we discussed a lot of the potential catalysts to drive Equities as an asset class higher over the intermediate/long-term, however, we continue to err on the cautious side given our outlook for sideways chop in the short-term.

Thursday I wrote about a growing number of potential "oopsies" (failed moves), so I want to follow up on that post and outline another group of charts that I think are suggesting short-term weakness in stocks.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

During last week's Conference Call we discussed a lot of the potential catalysts for a lower US Dollar, so I wrote a free post talking about whether a weaker US Dollar means US stocks have to underperform International stocks. If you haven't read that, please do that first, because in this post I'm going to quickly touch on a short-term theme that continues to build within our Global ETF Ratio universe.

We might be in a rangebound market for stocks, but one thing is for sure: the trend for Technical Analysis is up.

I've had a front row seat to the growth of this discipline and its practitioners for the past 15 years, since first starting my journey. I was half way through John Murphy's Technical Analysis of Financial Markets when I knew this was for me. Things only became more clear after that. As I read through Edwards & Magee and many other books, the way markets behaved just started making more and more sense.

The cool thing about working with smart people is being able to learn from them. Having Sean McLaughlin on our team has made everyone better, not just our clients but us as well. In today's video, we tackle the question of when it makes more sense to finance an options position by selling a different contract to collect the income vs simply just buying calls or puts. As usual, Sean does a nice job of explaining this in a way that anyone could understand.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Tuesday I posted a Mystery Chart that got a lot of replies.

Most said you'd be buyers at current levels or on a pullback, but a number of you were skeptical of the recent move and would be avoiding or fading it.

The feedback I got was interesting, so let's get right into the actual chart.

This week's Mystery Chart was an inverted daily line chart of the Metals & Mining ETF relative to the S&P 500. Below is the corrected chart.

Prices have put in a multi-year top, remain below support and a downward-sloping 200-day moving average, and momentum is in a bearish range. All signs continue to point to under-performance in this market sub-sector.

Click on table to enlarge view.

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?

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 March 19th at 7PM ET. Here are the details for the call:

If there is one thing that has worked since October, it's cash. I feel like people are afraid of that word. Like you're doing something wrong for raising some (or a lot of) cash. Do you think it makes sense to always be fully invested? I don't.

I look at everything through the lens of potential opportunity cost. What else could we be doing with that money? In liquid markets, sometimes it's treasury bonds, other times it's gold, and of course all of the market neutral pair trades and options strategies to profit from sideways markets.

Cash is an investment too. Why do you always have to be all in? You want to think 50 years out? Go ahead. We're only concerned about the next couple of quarters. We'll worry about next year, next year. And 50 years from now? I only hope to be around sipping wine and ripping through charts. We'll see...

So about today.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

My presentation at Chart Summit 2019 focused on market breadth and how we like to keep our process of looking at the subject pretty simple.

While that presentation covered a number of our methods of measuring the market's internals, in this post I want to share some stats we pulled this weekend that help provide some valuable context around the market's rally from the December 24th lows.

The table below outlines the major US Indexes we cover with performance stats from important inflection points: The January 2018 highs, the September 2018 peak, and the December 24th low.

We also have some additional stats listed like percentage below 52-week high and above 52-week low, days since those events occurred, whether the daily RSI reading is in a bullish or bearish range, and whether prices are above their 200-day moving average.

The columns we want to pay attention to for now are the first three.

Click on table to enlarge view.

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.