There is a lot that we can learn from Warren Buffett, who many consider to be one of the greatest investors of all time. To me, the most important lesson of all of them, and there are many, is that there are no called strikes on wall street. In other words, in liquid markets, you are not penalized for "missing" a trade. This is a lesson that took me many years to finally understand and is something that has helped me tremendously.

Every 2 weeks I sit down with the good folks at Benzinga to chat about the markets on their morning radio show. Today we went over specific trades that have zero correlation with the S&P500 and Nasdaq100, which are both stuck in a short-term sideways range. The S&P500 has done nothing for 2 months and the Nasdaq100 has done nothing for 3 months. These consolidations come within the context of longer-term bear markets so we would rather look elsewhere for money making opportunities.  We discuss precious metals, Crude Oil, Natural Gas, Japanese Yen and some individual stock ideas.

Here is the full interview:

On April 5th 2016, I finally got on board and initiated coverage of Bitcoin. For years, readers had been pressing me to analyze the price behavior of Bitcoin, but I never felt it was a big enough/liquid enough market. After a healthy consolidation since the 4th quarter last year, I said, "If we break out from this base, we could see a monster rally towards $700".

That was enough for me and I put out an announcement in early April that we were initiating coverage of Bitcoin priced in U.S. Dollars from both short-term and longer-term perspectives. Sure enough, just a couple of weeks after we initiated coverage, prices broke out as we had hoped and it has been a screaming buy ever since. Members of All Star Charts have been receiving weekly updates since then and have benefited tremendously over a very short period of time. This weekend, Bitcoin hit our tactical upside target netting a 58% return in less than 2 months. But this doesn't mean that the trade is over. To the contrary, I think there are still plenty of opportunities in this space.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @brunicharting

***

Both American Express and Goldman Sachs have been serious under-performers off both the August 2015 and January 2016 lows when the broader market put in major bottoms. While there have been other laggards in the Dow like Nike, Apple, and Disney, both Goldman Sachs and American Express are currently offering short setups where the risk is well-defined and the risk/reward is elevated.

Last week I shared with you guys what I thought was an interesting breakout. Like I try and do every now and then, I deleted the labels and the y-axis so you guys wouldn't have any biases towards the charts, knowing what it was. Everyone pretty much agreed that it was a screaming buy. Today we're bringing back the legend and y-axis so you can see exactly what is it. We are also flipping it upside down, the way it was originally intended to be, so you can execute according to your specific time horizon and risk tolerance.

Every month I host a conference call for All Star Charts 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.

This month's Conference Call will be held on Wednesday June 15, 2016 at 7PM ET. Here are the Registration Details:

When we talk about "the stock market", some people are referring to the S&P500 or maybe the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But these are just 2 large-cap indexes in one country in the entire world. Cliché or not, this isn't a stock market, it is a "market of stocks". These come in all different sizes and countries around the world to collectively make up a "stock market".

It's interesting to compare markets around the world to each other to get an idea of where the relative strength lies and where the weakness might be. Today we're taking a look at the S&P500 in the U.S. vs the Nikkei in Japan and the EuroStoxx50 in Europe.

We all have the freedom and ability to focus on any part of the financial markets that we want. Some people get paid to gossip about the federal reserve and others get paid to make money in the market. We all have different objectives. If you're reading this, it's probably because you do not get paid to make noise, but instead, you get paid to make money in the market. This means you don't care what stock or ETF makes you money as long as it's making you money right? We don't avoid certain topics here because it's not sexy enough for our sponsors. I don't even have any sponsors.

So today we are taking a look at Belgium. Why? Because why not?

It's that time again. I have a mystery chart that I think is worth paying attention to. As always with these, I took out the y-axis and all labels to eliminate any biases. Remember, the idea is not to guess what this actually is (although most of you guys can't help yourselves). The point of this exercise is to think about what you would do?

This can be a Stock, ETF, Commodity, Currency, Index, Ratio, etc. What do you want to do here? Buy, Sell or Do Nothing?

Hi I’m J.C. and I’m a Technician.

I analyze the behavior of the market and market participants. I do this every day and have been doing this professionally for well over a decade. In 2008 I earned my Chartered Market Technician (CMT) designation and founded Allstarcharts.com in 2010. What started as just a humble blog has turned into one of the fastest growing technical analysis research platforms in the world. The platform is jam packed with actionable trade ideas and analysis, but I recognize this can be overwhelming at times. That's why I'm writing this post - to help our newer members take full advantage of all that the platform has to offer in a short period of time.

When you talk about the "stock market", there is so much more to it than the S&P500 or what the Dow did on a given day, week or month. These are just 2 popular indexes in the most popular country in the world. But in reality, that's all they really are. One of them, the S&P500 is cap-weighted, so the biggest companies in the world, $AAPL $FB $XOM etc, drive the direction of the index. The other, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is made up of just 30 humongous American stocks. That's what these things are.

The actual stock market, or "market of stocks", includes many more stocks and indexes, not just in the U.S., but globally. Today I want to talk about what we're seeing out of the Financials in Europe and what the implications of the recent behavior might be.

This weekend I took advantage of some time off to go over every single chart that I follow from all over the world. These include U.S. Stocks, Sectors and Indexes, International Indexes, Commodities, Currencies and Interest Rate Markets. There are many people complaining about the uncertainty in the current market environment. But I would argue that there is always uncertainty in the market and today is no different.

Back in January, Energy Stocks put in their lows on both an absolute and relative basis. Whether you're looking at the big Integrated Names like Exxon and Chevron, or the Services Companies like Schlumberger or Halliburton, or even the Explorers and Producers, they all bottomed in January, a month before Crude Oil finally put in its low. Energy stocks also bottomed first on a relative basis when compared with the S&P500.

Today we are looking at the current implications of this particular leadership in the stocks relative to the commodity and the direction in which they are heading:

For newer members I want to give a little bit of background on the 2016 Crude Oil Trade. Back in February our line in the sand was $29.60 based on multiple key Fibonacci extensions clustering together near that level. We wanted to be aggressively long Crude Oil along with energy stocks, emerging market country ETFs as well as the metals and mining stocks and commodities that had high correlations with that particular emerging space. With Crude Oil specifically, our tactical upside target was $38, and our longer-term target was $50. Both of these upside objectives have now been achieved.

So now what?

Relative Strength is something that I take very seriously. When markets are falling, we want to look for stocks holding up the best. That is what we call relative strength and tends to lead us towards the future leaders for ensuing rallies. It's the same thing on the way up. When markets are rallying, like we saw in the past week for stocks, the ones that don't participate are showing their true colors.

One of the most valuable exercises throughout my process is going through every single country around the world looking at both weekly and daily charts. One by one I make my annotations and take my notes. This is certainly time consuming, but the process makes it impossible for me not to notice similar themes going on around the globe. I promise you from the bottom of my heart that the reason I got bullish in late January after being the biggest bear on The Street coming into 2016 was because of the behavior of global markets. My turning bullish had nothing to do with the U.S. stock market.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @brunicharting

***

Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX) has fallen roughly 90% from its August 2015 highs, but is now potentially setting up for a counter-trend rally.

Structurally this stock remains in a strong downtrend, but is now testing long-term support near 25-27. Prices first tested this level in March and April of this year, rallied briefly, but are now slightly undercutting those lows as momentum attempts to put in a bullish divergence. If prices are above 27 on a weekly closing basis, that would confirm the bullish momentum divergence and failed breakdown.

Last week I shared a chart with you guys where I purposely left out the ticker symbol and y axis. The reason I post these mystery charts every now and then is to eliminate any biases that we all have in these markets. This allows us to approach a market and focus only on the supply and demand dynamics in order to forget everything else.

The most recent Mystery Chart was the U.S. 10-year Note Yield upside down. Here is the actual chart where you can see yields approaching the apex of these two converging trendlines: