There are a lot of interesting charts out there around the world. The current market environment has provided us with a ton of opportunities in multiple asset classes. We've talked about stocks, we discussed commodities, and today I want to focus on the Bond Market. Both Interest Rates and the most liquid exchange traded fund are at critical levels that we need to watch. 

It feels good to be back in the office listening to music and ripping through charts! This is something I love to do. The past few weeks were incredible. I met with a lot of smart people throughout Europe and I'm back with new perspective, new ideas and new friends. You can't put a price tag on those experiences. When people ask me what they should invest in, I can't help but answer with: yourself. Invest in what you're doing and what you're learning. I believe this to be true now more than ever.

While updating our Members-Only Chartbooks today we came across two major breakouts that need to be pointed out as they play key roles in the Infrastructure and Public Sector Bank Sectors.

Let's take a look.

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!"

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Wall Street is a game of relative performance and we each are tasked with our own mandates/constraints in managing our portfolios.

The good news is that even when the market is a hot mess on an absolute basis, there are still plenty of ways to find performance within the context of those constraints.

If you need to have most of your capital allocated most of the time, then your focus is on either avoiding/shorting areas of relative weakness and owning areas of relative strength.

If you have the flexibility to raise cash and go to the beach or have short exposure on your books, that works too.

Interest Rates in the United States hit new 52-week lows last month. But from the looks of it, the commodities market and stock market are not in agreement with that direction. It's when we see divergences among asset classes that it gets my attention.

Today we're looking at the divergences between stocks, bonds and commodities that I believe are pointing to higher rates this quarter. If we're going to take the weight-of-the-evidence approach, it's 2 to 1 in favor of rising interest rates. 

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Wednesday's Mystery Chart is one of my favorite charts in the world.

First off, I want to thank everyone for your feedback and participation, as always. I received a lot of answers and most of you were buying the breakout along with me, while a few of you were looking for an "oops" to get short and fade it.

With that in mind, let's reveal the chart.

In our April 10th Chart of The Week, as well as in our Member's Only Conference Call on Thursday, we presented the question of whether the bearish momentum divergences we were seeing in the Nifty 50 and other major indexes would matter or if the market would brush them off and continue higher.

Well, we finally got our answer.

What inflation?

This seems to be the talk of the town these days.

Interest rates all over the world made new lows last month and have since then tried to start a recovery. We're seeing this across the developed world in the U.S., Germany, UK and Japan, among others. Meanwhile, journalists at Bloomberg Business Week decided to put a dead dinosaur on the cover of the latest issue asking, "Is Inflation Dead?"

A big theme for me this year has been the US Dollar and how it will impact stocks as an asset class. The thought process coming into 2019 was simple. The Dollar had rallied throughout 2018 to reach some pretty critical levels. The idea was that if the Dollar was going to rip right through there, it was more than likely happening in an environment where investors would be fleeing to safety. That's the type of market where stocks are selling off. The opposite of that argument was that if the Dollar was not breaking out, that stocks would likely be doing well, both in the U.S. and more importantly globally.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

The market remains a “hot mess", so we’re looking under the surface at breadth and risk appetite measures to identify clues as to the potential direction that this 15-month range will resolve itself.

Today I want to look at one of those measures, Consumer Discretionary stocks vs Consumer Staples.

If you're a long-only fund manager that believes the market is headed higher, you're going to be in more aggressive areas of the market like Discretionary. If you believe the market is headed lower or isn't going to do much, you're going to be in the lower beta, often higher dividend Consumer Staple stocks.

So what's happening in these sectors right now?

The Equal-Weight Consumer Discretionary vs Equal-Weight Consumer Staples continues to struggle with a flat 200-day moving average and confluence of support/resistance, but just made new 6-month highs this week. While this chart still work to do to confirm an intermediate-term uptrend, this is extremely constructive action and is suggesting that risk appetite among market participants is beginning to pick up.

Last week's Chart of The Week discussed the "One More High" type setup we often see  prior to price consolidations or pullbacks, providing some context around why we continue to remain structurally bullish, but not very aggressive in the short-term.