The cool thing about working with smart people is being able to learn from them. Having Sean McLaughlin on our team has made everyone better, not just our clients but us as well. In today's video, we tackle the question of when it makes more sense to finance an options position by selling a different contract to collect the income vs simply just buying calls or puts. As usual, Sean does a nice job of explaining this in a way that anyone could understand.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Last week I had the pleasure of being on Real Vision TV where I recorded two segments, one on Bonds and Equities pairs trade (short EWJ/SPY).

The video to the Equities trade is here, but since I'm not sure if/when the free video about Bonds will be out I wanted to go through that trade for you all on the blog. And if the video does come out, I'll be sure to share it.

Here's the video from a live interview I did on ET NOW, India's leading business news channel. It's amazing that I could not live further away than I currently do, yet we can still do this sort of thing. Their morning TV is my evening, but it works.

In this interview we discuss the ongoing rangebound market in US Stocks and then we shift gears to India's stock market. We talk about the rotation into small & mid-caps, key levels for both the NIFTY50 and Bank NIFTY as well as the relative strength we're seeing in the bank stocks, particularly ICICI and AXIS Bank.

Here is the video in full:

Tuesday's Mystery Chart received some interesting responses, with some of you stating that the bottom is in, while others said it's still too early to tell.

So let's get into what that chart is and why it's relevant.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Tuesday I posted a Mystery Chart that got a lot of replies.

Most said you'd be buyers at current levels or on a pullback, but a number of you were skeptical of the recent move and would be avoiding or fading it.

The feedback I got was interesting, so let's get right into the actual chart.

This week's Mystery Chart was an inverted daily line chart of the Metals & Mining ETF relative to the S&P 500. Below is the corrected chart.

Prices have put in a multi-year top, remain below support and a downward-sloping 200-day moving average, and momentum is in a bearish range. All signs continue to point to under-performance in this market sub-sector.

Click on table to enlarge view.

Some people actually think this world is just filled with rainbows and butterflies and stocks are always supposed to go up. I never understood that ignorance. Sometimes stocks go up, sometimes they go down and sometimes they go sideways for a while. It will take you less than 5 minutes of market history research to understand this very simple fact.

Of those 3, I would argue we are in the 'sideways for a while' category in U.S. Stocks, particularly the S&P500.

It's been a frustrating period for stocks in Canada over the past decade. Up just 7% since their 2008 highs, Canadian equities have been consistently underperforming for almost 10 years. But are things now finally changing?

Going through charts and coming up with conclusions is not just something you do once. For this to work, Technical Analysis has to be a lifestyle. Getting away from the screen regularly and coming back open minded is part of that work / life balance. In this conversation I talk about some of the struggles I've had personally trying not to let the implications of us being right in our assessment impact my decision making. Thanks to Donnie Hensley and Speedtrader for being a part of Chart Summit 2019.

Last week we wrote about signs of a long-term bottom in stocks emerging and the market has continued higher since then. Today we want to look the individual sectors to identify where we want to be selling strength, buying weakness, and avoiding altogether.

We've also written a post about the individual stocks with the best reward/risk proposition right now, so be sure to check that out as well.

In our other post we looked at all the sectors to identify our stance toward each and equities as an asset class, so this post will focus on the best individual stock trade setups in the market right now. If you haven't read that, please read that first so you have some context around this post.

If there is one thing that has worked since October, it's cash. I feel like people are afraid of that word. Like you're doing something wrong for raising some (or a lot of) cash. Do you think it makes sense to always be fully invested? I don't.

I look at everything through the lens of potential opportunity cost. What else could we be doing with that money? In liquid markets, sometimes it's treasury bonds, other times it's gold, and of course all of the market neutral pair trades and options strategies to profit from sideways markets.

Cash is an investment too. Why do you always have to be all in? You want to think 50 years out? Go ahead. We're only concerned about the next couple of quarters. We'll worry about next year, next year. And 50 years from now? I only hope to be around sipping wine and ripping through charts. We'll see...

So about today.