Register here for our live monthly conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts India.

July's Strategy Session will be held on Wednesday, July 7th at 7 PM IST. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with all of our past conference calls.

Here are the details for Tuesday:

This is JC's Playbook to Profit In Q3:

I've been out of town for the past week clearing my head and taking a break from markets. This is one of the most important parts of my entire process. I explained why in this post. While I was away, I peaked at the Internets to see what the twitterati was up to while I was on vacation. Since I was in Hawaii, 6 hours removed from New York City, most of what I read was after market hours. Boy are you guys pessimistic! Do you not see that stocks are in major uptrends? And not just in the U.S. but all over the world? Do you not read anything I write? I could not have laid out the bull case an clearer before I left.

Today I wanted to share with you what I think is one of the more bullish developments we've seen this month: the Russell Micro-cap Index breaking out to a new all-time high. If I have not exhausted this notion enough by now, let me stress: a new all-time high is NOT a characteristic of a downtrend. This is not an opinion. This is simply a fact. Write it down. Tattoo it on your forehead if you have to. Trust me, it took me a long time to finally understand this concept, so don't...

Taking time off regularly has been one of the most rewarding parts of my professional life. This is especially the case in recent years now that I've finally recognized its true value. Besides the obvious fun and relaxing parts about a vacation, it's more about the results of that experience that I'm most concerned with. A lot of us work very hard and we spend an inexplicable amount of time and energy trying to solve the always evolving puzzle that we call the stock market. It's easy for us to get lost in the madness. In fact, as humans, we're built to get lost in it. So it's important to recognize that this flaw exists within us so we may act accordingly to counter that trait as best we can.

The harder we work the easier it is to get stuck in a specific mindset. The deeper we get involved emotionally, in this case over (too much?) time, the harder it is to visualize the environment from the outside looking in. One of the ways that I try and avoid this common mistake is buy cleaning out all of my charts and starting from scratch to rebuild my entire chartbook. Remember, my book consists of well over 3000 charts in total and I run through these religiously on a weekly...

This week was our monthly conference call for Premium Members. We discussed a lot of things, mostly surrounding the fact that stocks are in uptrends all over the world and we are seeing broadening participation among stocks in the United States. Sectors that had been left for dead the past 6 months like Industrials and Materials are now coming up on all of my momentum and relative strength screens. Healthcare and Utilities are also breaking out to new highs. It's not just one sector or a handful of stocks with some stupid acronym. This is a stock market rally that I believe is a lot younger than most people believe.

Today I wanted to share with you one of the things that has stood out to me the most over the past couple of months. It should not be a surprise really because I've been pointing to the way this is setting up since late last year. I think this can really be a monster. I definitely recommend watching the video archive of this month's call. We're talking over 150 slides filled with...

These are the registration details for our live monthly conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts India.

This month’s Conference Call will be held on Tuesday, June 22nd at 7PM IST. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since our launch.

Here are the details for Tuesday:

The debate that will always persist is the Stocks vs Gold question. Do we own gold? Do we own stocks? Do we own both? What percentage of our portfolio should be in precious metals? Do we own the physical or the ETF? Whether Gold is at new highs or new lows, the questions will keep coming. It's something that us as humans are driven to constantly. I've learned to embrace it. While I treat Gold and the S&P500 the same way I treat Cotton futures and the Egypt30 Stock Index, it's understandable why others don't.

So let's look at it. In which direction should we expect the next 20% - Gold or US Stocks? 

Today we are taking a look at the most important stock sector in the world: Financials. If Financials are leading the stock market higher, it's hard to be bearish equities as an asset class. The first thing we want to do is start from the top with Financials relative to the rest of the market as well as from a long-term perspective. Then we'll take a look at some breadth internals and the sub-sectors that fall within the larger spectrum of Financials, like Regional Banks and Insurance. Once we get structural perspective on Financials as a group, then we'll work our way down to the individual stock level. That's the top/down approach that we incorporate into every sector in the market and country around the world.

Every month I host a conference call for All Star Charts Premium Members where we discuss ongoing themes throughout the global marketplace as well as changes in trends where new positions would be most appropriate. This includes U.S. Stocks & Sectors, International Stock Indexes, Commodities, Currencies and Interest Rate Markets.

We've been bullish towards US and Global Stocks once again since last month. I still think this is an environment where we need to be buying weakness in stocks, not selling strength. The weight of the evidence is still pointing to an increased amount of risk appetite, not risk aversion. What we're seeing in the bond market, however, is suggesting interest rates are heading higher. The implications here for assets like Gold, Silver, Crude Oil and the US Dollar is also important to recognize.

I'll do my best to lay out my weight of the evidence conclusions and walk you step by step with how I got there! This month's Conference Call will be held on Monday June 19th at 7PM ET. Here are the Registration Details:

The Bond Market is a very misunderstood place. Usually all we hear are complaints. Fed this, Yellen that, something about her books being beige. I don't know. I can't keep up anymore. To me the Bond Market is place to find information that we can't get anywhere else. Even if you don't trade bonds, you must care about the direction of interest rates. But more importantly it's the intermarket implications of movements in rates that we're most concerned about. How is the next 3-6 month direction of interest rates and credit spreads going to affect stocks and commodities? WAs investors we're obviously interested in all of these things.

Let's get right into it:

Earlier in 2017, I mentioned this was going to be an exciting year filled with new additions to AllStarCharts.com. I’m excited to announce one of the many today with the launching of All Star Charts EDU. This new addition is an educational section of the site dedicated to helping users grow their knowledge of technical analysis. With each one of these tools and principles, I also explain how I personally use it and how it helps me throughout my process. I think this will give you a better understanding as to how I approach the market and can also be used as a resource in the future.

In honor of the...

Register here for our live monthly conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts India.

June's Strategy Session will be held on Tuesday, June 8th at 7 PM IST. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with all of our past conference calls.

Here are the details for Tuesday:

This concept of new 52-week highs can be somewhat confusing. I get it. How does it work? If we make new highs and the list of new highs doesn't confirm, do we short everything? How do we know if and when the internals of the market have confirmed or diverged from whatever the price of the index itself is doing? These days, it seems like people have more questions than answers. So today we'll take a look at what's going on and see if we can try to work through it together.

It's the end of the month so you know what that means: Brand new freshly completed monthly candlesticks for us to review. While I normally use weekly charts to get structural perspective on markets and then daily charts for tactical purposes, the monthly chart review is done at the end of each month to help identify the primary trends around the market. This is for us who want to avoid the day to day noise surrounding politics or the Fed or whatever news story is being sensationalized this week.

Precious metals are in a downtrend. There is no question in my mind that prices have been heading lower, not higher. We had a beautiful counter-trend rally in the first half of last year and we took full advantage of that from the long side. But our upside objectives were hit in the Summer. Since then it's either been a short or neutral in terms of positioning. At this point we want to continue with this approach and mindset within this group of securities - both the stocks and commodities. Long positions here make little sense to me from any sort of intermediate-term horizon.

Chartered Market Technician and author of The Daily Gold, Jordan Roy-Byrne invited me on his Daily Gold Podcast last week. We discuss both the short-term and longer-term implications of the behavior of the metals market lately. This is the Gold post he references throughout the interview.

This is a global market environment. The S&P500 goes up and down based on the collective money flow from investors all over the world, not just within the borders of the United States. There are some people still fighting the civil war who simply don't understand this concept. US Stocks don't move up and down based on what is happening in America. What happens in the United States politically, economically, tax-wise, etc is just a tiny tiny piece of a humongous puzzle. This is a global market environment and the sooner you recognize that the bigger the advantage you will have over others who have not yet accepted this concept.

Even if you only trade US Stocks, or stocks local to where you live, understanding what is happening globally is essential to recognizing the direction of the underlying trend for the asset. And this trend identification is step 1 to market analysis. Today I went through every stock market index in the world to see if there is more good or more bad out there. Here are a few stand outs:

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It's hard being a gold bug. They rarely ever get to be right. But why don't they ever change their mind when the data changes? I don't get it. There is nothing wrong with being bullish gold, but there is something wrong with always being bullish gold.

This is one of my favorite exercises. We want to recognize that we as human beings are terrible investors. It's not our fault, it's just how we're built. So to overcome that we first to be aware of it. This alone puts you in the 1% and gives you a huge advantage over others who are not aware. To further help ourselves, we need to avoid letting our other biases affect our judgement. This is almost impossible. 

My weekly run through the S&P500 components is one of my favorite parts of the work week. I put on some music and go through all 1000+ charts. Remember we use the weekly charts to get structural perspective and then the daily timeframes to define more tactical opportunities: 2 charts for each of the 500 stocks. I then break down the index into 11 Sectors and run my analysis of stocks one sector at a time. This way it helps give me a better feel for that particular area within the entire stock market. To take it one step further, I then break down each of the 11 sector workbooks of charts into sub-sectors. So for example, in the "Energy Sector" there will be 4 sub-sectors: Integrateds, Services, Exploration/Production and Refiners.

The reason I'm really pressing this process lately is because of just how sideways the market has been for U.S. Stock Indexes. In order to get clues as to which way this consolidation will revolve is to look under the hood and see what's going on. Does the body have some strong organs left to keep it alive, or is this it? You can't just look at a car or look at a person and be able to properly diagnose the problem, or the good health for...

We live in a world of if/then statements. That's just the way it is. I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, or next month or next year. But that's okay because no one else does either. That whole lie about "uncertainty" is just that: a lie. There is always uncertainty. That's the point of all this. So we do our best to put together a road map filled with if/then statements. If the market does this, then we will do this. If that market does that, then we'll have to do that. This is the case today, it's been no different in the past and will likely be the same in the future. I don't know of any other way to manage risk responsibly.

These if/then statements are always changing, of course. The big question mark today is whether or not the U.S. Stock Market will begin to see an improvement of breadth, or if the deterioration will continue. In the past I've outlined some of my favorite breadth measures. Most of these are not confirming the new highs we're seeing in the S&P500 this week. But that statement is not fair on its own. The word "yet" needs to...

When we talk about "stocks", it can be in reference to many things. Most people like using something like the S&P500 or Dow Jones Industrial Average as a gauge because those are the popular United States indexes which contain many of the world's largest companies. That's fair. Depending on what country you live in, your interests are likely to be on your local indexes while you also keep an eye on maybe the United States and/or European Averages. I think it's important to understand that while these indexes are made up of companies based in local economies, the investors that own those stocks come from all over the world. We live in a global marketplace and I think it would be irresponsible of me as an investor to ignore that.

There are a lot of tools I use to measure the strength or weakness of the overall stock market environment. One of my favorites is a global index I created where I equally weight the largest 10 stock markets in the world. Each country represents 10% of the Allstarcharts Equally-weighted Top 10 Global Index $GLOBE. It includes both Emerging and Developed Markets. So you'll get Japan, London, Europe, Canada, US but also Brazil and India for...