Jack Dorsey, CEO of both Square $SQ and a little-known company named Twitter $TWTR, is having a pretty good year. How good? Well, in the last 365 days, $SQ is up 177% and Twitter is up a more modest 158%. Boy, the sentiment in these two names sure has changed. It seemed like just yesterday Jack Dorsey was America's most hated CEO. "Pick one!" the masses screamed. Everyone thought he had taken on too big of a workload as the stocks of both companies languished in prolonged downtrends. Amazing what twin upward trending stock prices can do for Public Relations.

While both stocks look compelling here, we're going to take advantage of some attractive volatility being priced into $SQ options and an earnings event to play both sides against.

For months we've been focusing our long efforts on stocks in sectors like Fast Moving Consumer Goods that have been showing relative strength. Today we're revisiting the Consumer Goods sector as it makes new all-time highs on an absolute basis and nearly 1-year highs relative to the Nifty 500 to see what names we want to be involved in to capitalize on this theme.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

Here is a look at the Nifty Fast Moving Consumer Goods Index on an absolute basis, showing prices marching toward our price target of 30,710 after two months of consolidation.

Here is a list of Consumer Goods stocks we want to be buying. You'll notice that many of them have been discussed in our posts before, but are listed here because they continue to show relative strength and well-defined reward/risk opportunities.

I just got back from a vacation in the south of France and northern Italy. I've written in the past about the benefits of getting away and the positive impact it can have on decision making and portfolio returns. If you have the discipline to stay away from your computer during a staycation, that works too. I personally cannot help myself but to go check out some charts if I know I have access to the computer. So I need to get out of town. This year we chose Europe.

Ever since first studying Fibonacci in 2005, I knew his statue was somewhere in Pisa. The trouble was finding it. There isn't much information out there. Some of you have been asking me about this for your upcoming trip to Italy or just keeping note of it for the future. So I figured it would help to just lay it out there as a reference for when you need it.

Also See: Fibonacci In Trading

This is Part 2 of the 3rd Quarter Playbook for Members of Allstarcharts.com and focuses more on the Global Macro and Intermarket composition of the current environment. For more US Sector and Stock specific analysis, see Part 1.

Now that we're halfway through the year, it seems like an appropriate time to review market breadth both globally and within India to identify how we want to be positioned in equities during the second half of this year. In this post we'll do just that by looking at all of the global equity markets and Nifty sectors we track to determine their trend and momentum readings across multiple timeframes, so that we can come to a conclusion based upon the weight of the evidence.

With two weeks to July expiration, it's time to review our July positions that will be expiring soon and take any actions that are necessary to reduce risk or take profits. This is the time of the cycle when the theta cost of our long premium plays will start to accelerate against us, or the gamma risk in our short premium plays will start to ramp quickly against us. No bueno in either case.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Throughout April and May we've discussed market breadth improvements that have us bullish on equity prices both in the US and globally. Today I want to perform a simple exercise to see how the data we're looking at has developed over the last two months or so of trading.

With earnings for Apple coming up on July 31, there's just enough time, worthwhile juice, and a significant price level to lean against in order to potentially bite off some quick profits in $AAPL while limiting our downside risk. Since we don't have much time, lets cut right to the chase...

It is an honor to introduce the latest addition to our team here at Allstarcharts, Tom Bruni.

The running metaphors for Nike $NKE stock are too obvious, so I'll do my best to avoid them. However, it cannot be denied that last week's monster gap higher coming out of earnings has launched the stock around the final turn and it is now sprinting towards a big, fat, round number - $100. That big magnet coupled with a pretty common phenomenon called "post earnings drift" following positively received earnings events sets up a pretty compelling case for a profitable move setting up. 

Consumer Discretionaries have been a great indicator of market strength for a long time. This has been the best performing sector off the 2009 lows by a long shot, nearly doubling the performance of Tech, which has also been a monster. Discretionaries broke out to new highs in early 2012, well before the S&P500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average. With this sector breaking out to new all-time highs last month, it's hard to be bearish stocks.

This is Part 1 of the 3rd Quarter Playbook for Members of Allstarcharts.com and focuses on the U.S. Stocks Market. See Part 2 here.

Last month we introduced the newly added Monthly Chartbook in a post where we discussed the trends and perspectives seen through a long-term lens. Our conclusions were that many of our price objectives for the Nifty Sectors and Indices were hit and that a neutral approach was best in many cases. In that type of environment we wanted to focus our long trades in areas showing relative strength like large-cap Financial Services, IT, and Consumers Goods, while focusing our short trades in areas that were showing relative weakness, like mid and small-cap Infrastructure, Realty, and Metals stocks.

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 6th 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:

Next week I will be sending out our Q3 playbook. Email me if you're not already a Premium Member. There are so many interesting things happening right now that I think there will be plenty of opportunities to make money next quarter, despite it supposedly being a slower time of the year.

When months close at 4PM ET, I can't help myself but hit those monthly charts right away. I am very disciplined about never looking at them before the month is completed. You get into bad habits like that. So I look forward to the monthly candlesticks being done:

Let's get right into it:

...FEED them.

Continuing with a theme that emerged for us this week, we're taking recent volatility climbs as a gift to help us get through a typically slow summer trading period. Weeks like this one -- just ahead of a holiday week -- are the kinds that level-headed premium sellers wait for when putting on their "income trades."

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

One important part of the bull case for stocks in the US has been the leadership we've seen from small and mid-caps, growth areas of the market, and high beta stocks, however, we're starting to see some short-term deterioration in these leaders on an absolute and relative basis. Today I want to quickly look at the relationship between high beta stocks and their low volatility counterparts.

Over the last month we've spoken about weakness in small and mid-caps and the sectors we want to be involved in on both the long and short side. In healthy market environments we see sector rotation keep the broader market afloat as leaders correct through either time or price, however, we've not seen any of that over the last few months. The weakest sectors have not caught a bid as leaders correct, instead they've gotten even weaker. This is a problem.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

In 2017 we saw an acceleration of the decade-long trend of growth outperforming value, and after further deterioration in this ratio to start the year, the weight of the evidence is suggesting a bottom may be in.

I feel like the recent minor skirmishes in U.S. stocks over the past week have been a nice little gift for premium sellers heading into what is a traditionally the slowest period of the calendar year. With the Independence Day holiday on the horizon, it's looking to me like a great time to start selling some premium in the indexes. So we've got a quick and easy one to set up before you light up your grills and sparklers.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Every time the stock market rallies over any significant period, we're bound to see the "most shorted stocks" chart come out of the woodwork with an ominous caption like "presented without comment" or "this is the top". Besides the fact that presented without comment is a comment in and of itself, the presenter very rarely tells us the methodology behind the chart's construction, leaving us with more questions than answers.

Last week, Tom Bruni penned a post titled Global ETF Carnage Continues, highlighting how ETFs representing stock markets around the world have been getting hurt by US Dollar strength. While he isn't yet calling a bottom, there was one particular Latin American ETF that was beginning to show signs of bottoming and it is a scenario he'd like to see replicated in more global ETFs to give him confidence the turn is coming.

The best way I know how to stay engaged in this possible turn is to have some skin in the game.

05/01/2019 UPDATE:

As a result of the labor intensive process needed to maintain the Chartbook Notes and their lack of use by the majority of members, we have decided to discontinue this feature. We will be adding new tools and functionality to replace it by the end of the quarter. In the meantime if any of the charts in the Chartbook are unclear and you need further clarification, please feel free to contact us and we'll get back to you within 24 hours. Thank you in advance for your patience as we make these improvements to the site.

Over the last few weeks we've been making several changes to the site and will be adding more stuff over the coming weeks based on your feedback. One of the changes we've made is the notes in our Chartbooks. We've received several questions on how to interpret them, so today I want to use this post to quickly walk you through just that.

One of the most valuable parts of our research process in the US is our multi-timeframe analysis of the Dow 30 components. By analyzing 30 of the largest companies in the US markets we can quickly gain an understanding of the index's underlying trend and which sectors are showing relative strength and which are showing relative weakness.

In India, we perform the same exercise with the Nifty 50 and Nifty Next 50. Over the last few months we've pointed out the weakness in mid and small-cap stocks, but more recently our analysis of the individual stocks within the large-cap indexes has started to suggest that this weakness may be spreading. Yesterday we talked about weak stocks in the Nifty 50, so today we're going to perform the same exercise with the Nifty Next 50.