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".

He wrote,

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 January 15th at 7PM ET. Here are the details for the call:

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

In this post I want to highlight some of the most interesting and/or actionable relative-performance charts from our Global ETF Universe. Whether you're interested in actionable pair trades or simply looking for information about where money is flowing in the world, these charts should provide some good perspective on where various markets stand at the start of 2019.

Vacation is over and January is in full gear. Over the holidays we had our downside targets hit in the S&P500, Dow Jones Industrial Average (23,350), Dow Jones Transportation Average (9300), Nasdaq100 (6150), and Russell2000 ETF (129). Now, just because these levels were achieved, doesn't mean we can't go substantially lower.

However, in this post we're focused on the current mean reversion we're seeing in stocks around the globe and how to profit from it. We'll worry about later this year later this year.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

The media has been making quite the ruckus about 2018 and the "historic" volatility that the US Stock Market experienced, particularly in the fourth quarter. In this post I want to look at a few simple stats that help to put this past year's performance into its proper historical context, so that we can see whether or not it truly was a crazy year for stocks.

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.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Yesterday after the bell we sent out our Year End '18 ETF Risk Update to our Institutional Clients, covering 100+ of the most actionable and informative charts. To put this report together we examined over 500 inter-market and cross-asset relationships across weekly & daily time-frames to identify trend direction, momentum, risk-management levels, and prices targets.

In this premium post I want to highlight a few charts from each of our five sections: Factors, International, Domestic, Fixed-Income, and Thematic/Niche. If you like what you see and want the full report, you can fill out our Institutional Client Application or contact our Head of Institutional Sales, Jonathan Bloom, for access.

Without further adieu, let's look at some charts.