From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

I just finished this week's Top 10 Charts Report for Institutional Clients, but I wanted to carve out two Asian Equity Market charts for this post to highlight a tactical opportunity we're seeing in that part of the world.

So I did.

Let's take a look.

These are the registration details for the monthly conference call 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 Monday June 19th at 7PM ET. Here are the details for the call:

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Today we're looking at two Commodity charts that offer both intermarket signals and potential trading opportunities.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

On May 1st, we wrote an update called "Canada or Cantada" going through the major sectors/indexes to provide a view on how we wanted to approach Canadian Equities.

As we can see, there are more uptrends than downtrends from a structural perspective. Tactically however, most of these are not at levels where we want to be initiating new positions or have a lot of conviction. After strong moves since December, they need some consolidation to digest those gains and set up for a sustained move higher.

Another thing to note is that the more defensive areas of the market like REITs and Staples have the clearest structural uptrends of the group. They make up a smaller portion of the market, but I think it's still an interesting signal about market participants' risk appetite and outlook for Interest Rates.

Additionally Energy and Materials account for roughly 30% of the index and remain a headwind, so without rotation into those names I think it'll be tough for the TSX Composite to break out to the upside.

They don't need to be...

Life can be simple or you can make things complicated and noisy. It's up to you.

What business are you in? The business of trying to make money in the market or the business of making and/or consuming noise?

I was out in Greece on my honeymoon for a couple of weeks last month, but I was keeping an eye on what was going on. I love the market and I enjoy observing human behavior. So why should I completely shut myself off from something I like doing?

Now that I am married, I would very much like to keep my wife happy, and I also think it's important to get away (see here). So appropriately I shut things off and enjoyed my time in, what are now officially, my favorite islands in the world. It was funny because some of the locals in the Cyclades Islands were telling me how much they wanted to go to the Caribbean. I was like, "Naw man, stay here. Trust me!"

What I noticed from far far away is how noisy the market place can be if you...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Stocks showing relative strength in this environment remain on our radar since the list of them has shrunk day by day over the last month.

For our Institutional Clients, we provide more tactical trade ideas or "plus-ones" that don't necessarily fit a broader theme but are still an attractive opportunity worth exploring.

Today I want to share one of those ideas from a subsector of the market that may surprise you...Retail.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

At the beginning of May, we put out a note about the failed breakout in many of the major indexes and why a more cautious stance was warranted for US and global equities. The divergences we were seeing slowly add up had finally been confirmed by price and we raised cash and stepped aside.

Since then, patience has paid if you let it.

Lack of trend, not just in the US, but globally, has been THE theme.

A month later, let's look at what's changed since then and if our gameplan needs to be adjusted at all.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

The US Dollar has frustrated the majority of market participants this year, particularly if they're only looking at the US Dollar Index.

With that said, we've been focused on other US Dollar pairs that aren't getting much attention but are trending well and providing us with plenty of opportunities.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

We've been writing about the lack of trend in the Major Indices and highlighting some relative strength in places like Software and Insurance, but overall signals remain mixed.

This morning I set out to write another post about areas showing relative strength, hoping to find a clean theme that the most actionable stock setups fit within.

What I found can be boiled down to the length of two tweets.

"Going through the S&P 1500 I see a number of actionable names on the long side, but they don't all fit a theme. They're all from different areas of the market. Where there are themes I see a lot of extended names and unattractive entries."

and

"I can see that the path of least resistance is higher in a lot of names, but that doesn't mean that current levels offer an attractive entry."

Great themes, but no great way of executing...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Wednesday's Mystery Chart is one of my favorite right now, so thank you everyone for your feedback and participation.

I received a lot of answers, but most of you were skeptical of the breakout and wanted to see more before getting involved. A few others wanted to be long with a tight stop and few, if any, were sellers.

With that as our backdrop, let's get into it.

The actual chart was the ratio of the Insurance subsector ($IAK) relative to the S&P 500, which is breaking out to 11-month highs as momentum gets overbought for the first time in nearly 2 years.

To me this looks like a textbook trend reversal, so while there may be some backing and filling over the near-term, Insurance stocks look set to outperform over the intermediate/long-term.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

The relative strength is also...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

The trend is your friend...but what do we do if there is no trend?