Last month I shared a video of my Happy Hour with Traders Kimmy Sokoloff and Joe Fahmy. You guys sent in amazing feedback and I really enjoyed doing it. So today, I want to give you a peak at my conversation with Andrew Thrasher and Dan Russo. They both love drinking wine and we've always had that in common, so we discussed some of our favorites as well as our thoughts on the stock market and bond market.
It's cool to be able to sit back and relax with two of the smartest guys out there and hear what they have to say. I hope you enjoy!
I'm fortunate to have a lot of smart friends who are experts on the stock market. In some cases they're traders, or portfolio managers, analysts, financial advisors and best-selling authors. I get to have incredibly insightful conversations with my friends and colleagues every single day. But I understand that most people don't.
So today I'd like to share a video of a conversation I had yesterday with New York City Trader Kim Sokoloff, and about half way through my buddy Joe Fahmy also joined the chat. We discussed process, we talked about a few trade ideas we liked and just had an overall good time catching up.
These are the conversations I'm having regularly. I hope this gives you some insight as to how much I get to learn from my friends:
When it comes to "Continuation Patterns", Triangles are one of the more common ones you'll see. In this video we're discussing, more specifically, the Symmetrical Triangle, and how markets tend to consolidate between two converging trendlines. This series of higher lows and lower highs ultimately reaches its apex, which forces a resolution.
Throughout this course, we discuss all kinds of patterns, both continuation and reversals. In Triangle Land, we often see Symmetrical Triangles, Ascending Triangles, Descending Triangles and Wedges that appear like Triangles and have similar implications.
There are no called strikes on Wall Street. In other words, we're not penalized for not swinging, like you are in baseball. We have the ability to be patient, to a certain extent at least, depending on your mandate. But most of us don't have mandates! Even one of the best hitters of all time struggled when he swung at bad pitches. In this video we compare Ted Williams' batting average when he swung at good pitches, vs when he swung at bad ones.
This is my favorite reminder that in trading & investing, we want to wait for OUR perfect pitch, and then swing, vs just swinging at anything.
This is a market of stocks, and not just a "stock market".
All of these Indexes, from the Dow Jones Industrial Average to the Russell2000 Small-caps, are made up of components. There are 30 stocks in the Dow and 2000 stocks in the Russell2K, for example.
Are more of them going up? Are more of them making new highs? Are more of them showing bullish momentum characteristics? Are fewer and fewer components doing these things as the indexes make new highs? What about in downtrends? Are more stocks confirming the new lows in the indexes or are fewer and fewer stocks making new lows and showing bearish momentum characteristics as the market makes new lows?
The answers to these types of questions is what we call, "Market Breadth Analysis". There are a lot of ways to do this on all sorts of different time horizons. In this lesson we go over all the methods we use to decipher market breadth, which can be used by both individual traders and the largest financial institutions in the world.
In this Episode of Allstarcharts Weekly, Steve and I discuss all the reasons why we're buying bonds right now instead of stocks and commodities. The big point here for me is that it's not just one chart. There is no single holy grail suggesting we buy bonds. This is a weight of the evidence conclusion. It's not one chart, it's hundreds of them all pointing to the exact same thing: Sell stocks and Buy bonds!
In this Episode of Allstarcharts Weekly, Steve and I talk about the newest Sector in America: Communications. Back in 2018, the Index makers took out some of our favorite Technology stocks and put them along with some telecom into this new Index called Communications. With Google and Facebook now representing 40% of this $XLC index, the fact that we're just now breaking out to all-time highs says a lot about the space.
In this Episode of Allstarcharts Weekly, Steve and I discuss the less talked about tenets of Dow Theory. Everyone always likes to talk about the Dow Jones Industrial Average either confirming or diverging from the Dow Jones Transportation Average. But what gets forgotten is that there are many more tenets like Closing Prices are the most important, Identifying the direction of the Primary Trends and The Market Discounting Everything. Check out JC's 5 Most Important Dow Theory Tenets
This day and age we have other areas just as important, or even more important, than a group of Railroads, like what Charlie had when he first wrote down his Tenets in the late 1800s. Today we also compare the Dow Jones Industrial Average to the Semiconductor and Homebuilders Indexes as well as incorporate a series of ratios with Consumer Staples and Financials. It's more of an "and" than an "or" for us when it comes to Dow Theory.
You can also watch this entire video for just $1 by clicking this link. In this short clip below, I show you 3 specific points throughout the presentation where
1) I discuss risk management techniques and how we will know soon if we're wrong on our thesis,
2) a specific ratio that is a coincident and, often times, a leading indicator for US Stocks, and
3) how we identify specific trade ideas using the top/down approach, with 2 ideas in particular that we want to take advantage of today.
