Don't Fight Papa Dow

That's how I learned it. You'll hear my friend Ralph Acampora say that all the time!

"You Never Want To Fight Papa Dow"

My interpretation is that there is wisdom in the Dow Components. If you want to know which way the market is headed, focus on those 30 stocks.

I'm not going to get into the discussion about whether the Dow is the best index or not. I've made my case before and stand by it today more than ever. If you have a problem with Dow Jones or Standard & Poors, stop complaining about it and just go build a better index. It's not that hard. We do it every day.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, however, is a perfectly good index and gauge of stock market strength or weakness. One of the best parts is that there are only 30 components!

Hellooo??? Do you want to go through 500 stocks? Or 3000 in the case of the Russell3000?

Or just 30?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it’s a custom index or inverted, who knows!

We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.

You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the relative strength trends at play and preview some of the things we're watching in order to profit in the current market environment.

This week, we're going to highlight a number of critical Stock Market Indexes and Sectors, as well as assets in the FICC Markets that are approaching logical levels of overhead supply and pose the question... "Are risk assets due for some corrective action or consolidation?"

I think whether you're bullish or bearish, we can all agree that if the world is coming to an end, financials will be front and center leading the march down to zero.

What if it's like this?

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Welcome to this week's edition of the 'Louis' Look' column.

Every week I write a piece documenting what I'm learning through my internship at All Star Charts. You can read the previous post here. This week's edition is a shorter one to keep on today's theme of simplicity, so let's jump right into it.

JC, What do you mean rotation into the Dow Jones Industrial Average?

This is a bubble!

It can't possibly be the beginning of the Dow's move.

Wait, can it?

Well, despite all the hype about a bubble and the ridiculous rhetoric about a dislocation between wall street and main street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hasn't really done much the past 10 weeks. It hasn't made much progress at all, even if you include the past 2 weeks of gains. In fact, the last 2 weeks are all the gains since early June.

Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Transportation average has been the leader and broke out above those former June highs a while ago:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to this week's edition of "Under The Hood."

What we do is analyze the most popular stocks over the trailing week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.

We have some new additions coming for how we generate the list of most popular names, which we'll explain more each week as we add new data sets. There are so many new data sources popping up that all we need to do is organize them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: A list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.

The S&P 500 finally achieved new highs this week. The market is clicking on all cylinders as breadth and participation continues to broaden, and favorable risk/reward setups are popping up all over the place. Let's dive into the most popular tickers this week and see what's going on "under the hood" in these hot names.

This week on Happy Hour with Traders, I brought together some of the best minds when it comes to stock market breadth. You see all the breadth charts on twitter and you always hear debate about whether market breadth is weakening or improving. I think this round table discussion clears up a lot of misconceptions about the subject. I think it also gave each of us new ideas about how to approach the market from a weight-of-the-evidence perspective. I know I definitely got some new ideas that I want to start to do some more work on.

This is why we have these conversions. I'm fortunate to have really smart friends around the world that all view markets in their own unique ways. So I'm going to try my best to show them off so you can learn from them too!

Here's the latest Happy Hour with special guests Andrew Thrasher, Willie Delwiche, Mike Hurley and Steve Strazza. Enjoy!

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

The Fixed Income, Commodity, and Currency markets are near and dear to my heart. Ever since I began learning Technical Analysis, I've always loved analyzing things that are "off the beaten path." This included everything from Interest Rates to Soybeans to the Norwegian Krone. Equities are great and all, but this is the stuff that gets me up in the morning.

In addition to the blog posts we do on the site, I've wanted to explore new ways to share that passion with you all and show why even if you're not investing in these markets directly, they're worth paying attention to.

That brings us to my weekly show, "What The FICC?"

In this weekly video series, I'll be highlighting the most important chart or theme from these three asset classes while doing my best to tie that analysis back to Equities through an intermarket signal or a trade idea.

This week's episode is linked below, enjoy!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Thanks to everyone who responded to this week's Mystery Chart. Responses were somewhat mixed. It was a daily chart of the iShares Medical Devices ETF $IHI.

What we really wanted to know is whether or not investors are buying these kinds of bullish continuation patterns right now. Many alluded to the underlying trend being higher but still wanted to wait for the flag pattern to resolve before taking action.

This is a prudent approach and we're looking at the chart in a similar light. With that said, we're also viewing setups like this within the context of what is going on in other areas of the market. In other words, as more and more of these patterns resolve to the upside, which they are, the higher the likelihood is that others will follow their course.

In this post, we'll walk through our top-down approach to highlight why we like Medical Devices right now and then drill into some of our favorite setups as a way to express our bullish thesis.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Last night we held August's Monthly Conference Call which our Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we'll provide a summary of the call by highlighting 5 of the most important charts along with JC's commentary on them and a brief explanation for each.

Let's get right to it.

Traders often joke that there's support at Zero. And then Crude Oil Futures traded negative and we threw everything we thought we knew out the window. Where was that in your model?

Anyway, this is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the garbage that is, GE.

Next to Wells Fargo, this might be one of the worst companies on earth. It may actually be somehow worse. And by company, I don't care what's going on behind the scenes or who works there. I'm referring specifically to the stock, which is all that matters to us.

We're looking at 2 plots, the price itself going back several decades, and the relative strength (or weakness, in this case), compared to the S&P500. Notice how after the peak in 2000, the next 2 peaks (where US Stocks moved on to new all-time highs), $GE put in lower highs. Also look at the relative strength line breaking to all-time lows: