There's something fishy going on in Interest Rates and the U.S. Bond market right now. We've been bearish bonds and constructive about higher interest rates for as long as I can remember. This has worked out well. It was a big part of the bullish stocks thesis and it's played out. Bonds are at lows and rates are at highs. I just don't think it will be as easy for this to continue, particularly with what we're seeing from both a sentiment and intermarket perspective.

Here's what's got me thinking differently:

The market is a beautiful thing. We have uptrends and we have downtrends. We weigh the evidence regularly to determine which one of these we’re in, or if it's a sideways trend. Our approach to the market has to depend on the market environment we have. In other words, we have to play the cards we're dealt, not the cards we might want. So we first determine how we want to approach the market, and then we decide which vehicles would be the best way to express that thesis.

Here are a list short ideas that I think present favorable risk vs reward opportunities:

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Over the weekend I ran the performance metrics of the Russell 3000's Sectors and Industries to get some perspective on where the leadership is since the S&P 500's high on October 3rd and year-to-date. In this post I just want to share this table and talk about some of the themes I see.

The big question coming into this wasn't whether or not we wanted to be sellers of stocks, but how low could stocks go? The point I tried to make was that they could go a lot lower than any of us think. I've been around too long and have seen too much to be surprised by anything anymore. So if the risk is skewed to the downside, in theory there is unlimited risk. Whether there is or there isn't, is not the point. The fact alone that we're even talking about it has been reason enough to not be long this market.

When looking below trying to figure out how low we can go, I can draw all sorts of Fibonacci retracement levels and horizontal lines of all colors, but the truth is that the market doesn't care about JC's lines. Forced selling sparked by margin calls and hedge funds blowing up causes prices to blow through any "levels" all the time. Remember, when we identify specific prices, they are just levels of interest, not necessarily support levels. We won't know if they were actually support until well after the fact.

With that scary disclaimer in mind, I did my best to identify the most important levels of interest. This is where we want to be looking...

The thing about the market is that there is no holy grail. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to find it. The holy grail does not exist. We have to weigh the evidence knowing full well that we're working with incomplete information. The idea is to accumulate all of the data and make a conclusion based on all of it, not just some of it.

Today, I want to go over a few of the divergences that have put the bulls in a precarious situation. There is a large crowd of permabull "passive" investors that are taught just to buy stocks and hope for the best. They are shown all of these sexy equity curves and told again and again how much they would have made had they invested in the S&P500 in 1950 or 1982 or whatever cherry-picked date is forced upon them.

It doesn't make these people good or bad. It's just what it is. I think it's important for market participants to understand the way things work. Based on the tiny tiny sample size of a 100 years or so, sure a lot of these theories could make some sense. We've had less than a handful of secular bear markets during...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Marijuana stocks have never been that HIGH on our list of areas to look at given their smaller market-cap, average trading volume, and short price history often inhibits larger players from participating in them, however, the strong performance as of late has drum up interest in the space and increased the number of stocks that meet our criteria to analyze them. This post will be a quick update on what we're seeing from a price perspective.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

In July I looked at the trend and momentum readings of stock markets around the world and US Sectors and Sub-Sectors to identify the overall risk appetite for Equities. Today's update will perform the same exercise and compare the results to determine if breadth has improved, deteriorated, or stayed the same, as well as what the implications of these changes are.

This is 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 Wednesday October 17th at 7PM ET. Here are the details for the call:

Here is a list of stocks we want to be shorting to profit from the new bearish stock market environment we've been in this month. I believe this type of market is here to stay and here's how we can benefit:

The way I see it, we're either buying stocks at higher levels or we're buying them at lower ones. If this is just a shake out and we take off from here, that's fine. If we go lower, which is the higher probability, then it will take a series of positive divergences in breadth and momentum. All of the risk management levels we highlighted throughout September have been violated. That's life.

Here are the levels we have identified as the most important moving forward:

Two weeks ago I laid out what it would take for us to start getting more defensive in this market and not just blindly buying any and all dips. The thesis was that if certain things happened, they would not be consistent with an environment where we want to be as aggressive, and a more neutral approach would be best. Some of these developments have taken place and the impact has been seen so far in October.

Let's take another look.