We want to be buying stocks. I don't think I can be any more clear about that.

You guys know me as the obnoxiously bullish guy the past couple of years in the midst of "unprecedented pessimism". I'm willing to admit that I have an unfair advantage that I just pay attention to price and purposely ignore everything else that most of you have to endure. This focus has allowed me to see clearly what is actually taking place instead of assuming that who I'm listening to or reading knows what's going on.

Today I want to show you guys one single chart that I think tells the story of what the hell is going on here. It is awfully difficult for me to be bearish of stocks if the most important sectors in America are not just making new highs, but also breaking out to new relative highs. These leading sectors aren't just doing well, they're outperforming the rest.

U.S. Treasury Bonds have gotten absolutely destroyed, particularly on the shorter end of the curve. With interest rates exploding higher, money has been flowing beautifully out of the bond market. We're obviously happy to see that. It took a little longer to get going than we originally wanted it to, but we got there. So now the reevaluation process is upon us.

Today I want to talk about what we want to do here with respect to Bonds and Interest Rates and what some of our options might be. 

It's a bull market in stocks. The bond market is confirming that. Until we start to see evidence that suggests otherwise, we remain in the camp that this is a 'buy weakness' environment and not a time to be selling strength. To get 2018 going on a good note, Consumer Discretionary stocks broke out relative to the S&P500. This is one of the most important sectors in America and I believe it is still in a secular bull market.

Thank you again for being a founding member of Allstarcharts India. You came at a good time - the early stages of the build out of this Technical Analysis Research Platform. As you can see, the Monthly Conference Calls have been live and archived each month so far this year. We will continue with this routine every month moving forward and you can access all of them here: January 2018 and February 2018.

In the next couple of weeks you will be seeing several additions to the platform for Premium Members including several additional notes per week, an enhanced trade ideas page and an expansion of the Chartbook. We're really looking forward to this expansion that we have been working on for a long time....

Andrew Thrasher is the perfect guest to have on the podcast this month. His expertise in Volatility made him the 2017 Charles Dow Award winner, ironically the year that the US Stock market saw the lowest volatility on record. Today, Andrew is an Indianapolis-based Portfolio Manager at The Financial Enhancement group and we're thrilled to have him on. In this episode, Andrew walks us...

There is no denying that Technology has been a leader over the past 18 months. It's amazing how much this historic breakout in Tech was completely ignored in 2016 since U.S. elections are much sexier and help news people sell ads. "Forget the relative breakout in Tech, how does what Trump or Hillary said on the twitter today impact your portfolio?" You see the difference? We're not here to entertain or sell ads to sponsors. We're here to try and make money in the market.

In September of 2016 I was pounding the table about this monster 15-year base in Technology relative to the S&P500. There was no question that the path of least resistance was higher. As they say, the bigger the base, the higher in space. I encourage you to check out exactly what we were seeing at the time. Technology is up close to 50% since then while the S&P500 is up just about half that, 25%. So now the question is whether or not Technology, which has the largest weighting in the S...

Brazil just closed at an all-time daily and weekly closing high. These are not things we normally see in downtrends. Russia's MICEX also closed at new all-time highs. There is some serious strength coming from Emerging Market stocks and the data is still suggesting there is a lot more upside left out of this group. I think we're just getting started.

Today we're taking a look at some equally-weighted emerging market indexes that I put together and compare this group to other alternatives, like U.S. stocks and other developed markets such as Japan and Europe. There is an overwhelming theme here of rotation into Emerging Markets after years and years of underperformance. 2018 is a new year and emerging markets are leading us higher.

Brazil just closed at an all-time daily and weekly closing high. These are not things we normally see in downtrends. Russia's MICEX also closed at new all-time highs. There is some serious strength coming from Emerging Market stocks and the data is still suggesting there is a lot more upside left out of this group. I think we're just getting started.

Today we're taking a look at some equally-weighted emerging market indexes that I put together and compare this group to other alternatives, like U.S. stocks and other developed markets such as Japan and Europe. There is an overwhelming theme here of rotation into Emerging Markets after years and years of underperformance. 2018 is a new year and emerging markets are leading us higher.

Louise Yamada has been an inspiration to me for my entire career. Bringing nearly 4 decades of experience as a technical analyst, Louise adds a unique perspective on markets that makes her the perfect compliment to some of the younger guests that we've had on the podcast. Louise, who for a number of years received Institutional Investor's top ranking, was a special guest on "Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street" and you can still find her regularly being featured on...

Financials ripping to all-time highs is not something we see when stocks are in a downtrend. To the contrary, this is strong evidence of risk appetite for stocks. This seems to be something that is being underappreciated right now but I think is worth pointing to, again.

There are a lot of questions about the sustainability of the uptrend in stocks. Some might even say that stocks are "stretched" or have gone "too far too fast". But when you look at Financials, they're just getting going now. From many different perspectives, this sector has done nothing for a long time and is just now breaking out.

Next Monday I will by flying to Denver to speak at the local chapter of the CMT Association. This is my favorite time of the year to be in Colorado, so I'm thrilled to be there talking about charts and meeting with local traders and investors. I will do my best to walk you through my process from the top down and show you how I'm incorporating these tools in today's market environment.

This event is Free, but limited space is available. I encourage you to join us for a bunch of charts and then we'll grab some beverages afterwards with the Colorado Traders and Investors Group as well as members of the CMT Association. Here are all the details:

Mark Dow has been a favorite follow of mine on Twitter for a long time. His global macro perspective is directly in line with the way I view the world. We come from very different backgrounds, however. Mark worked for the U.S. Treasury Department in charge of Emerging Markets in the early 90s. After that he was a sovereign analyst at a Mutual Fund before running money for a Global Macro Hedge Fund in New York City. Today, Mark runs a Family Office from southern California...

Long Precious Metals has been a big theme for us this year. I still think this is an area we need to be involved with and the weight-of-the-evidence is suggesting higher prices for the entire space.

Today I want to point out the recent breakout in Swiss Franc Futures. Historically there is a high positive correlation between this contract and the price of Gold. As we break out to new multi-year highs in Swissy, Gold looks likely to follow along:

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 February 16th 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:

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 seen an increase in volatility in the stock market this past week but it has not spilled over into the commodities, currencies or interest rate markets. We'll discuss the current market environment and how we want to responsibly manage risk. A list of trade ideas with risk vs reward opportunities skewed in our favor will be the focus of this call. We want to err in the direction of the underlying trend and we will do our best to identify that throughout the call.

This month's Conference Call will be held on Thursday February 15th at 7PM ET. Here are the Registration Details:

Every month I host a conference call for All Star Charts India Premium Members where we discuss ongoing themes throughout the India Share Market. We take a look at all of the NSE Indexes and Sectors as well as some of our own custom indexes. At Allstarcharts we have become known around the world for the top/down approach to stocks. After we analyze each of the indexes and sectors and have identified where the strength and weakness lies, then we break it down to individual stock opportunities. By having momentum, relative strength and market trend in our favor, the probabilities of success increase dramatically.

We've been bullish towards Indian and Global Stocks as they remain in strong uptrends on any sort of intermediate-term time horizon. 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. We will go over a multi-timeframe approach on this conference call where we will start with the longer-term and then work our way down...

I don't like how many oversold conditions have been hit in the major indexes and most sectors. I've tried my best to point out the stocks showing both relative strength and momentum. But there are an awful lot of charts I see where oversold conditions in momentum is a problem. So the question becomes, is a retest of the lows necessary for stocks to continue higher?

Studying the behavior of market participants is something that we do on a daily basis, whether we recognize it or not. Especially as Technical Analysts who focus on changes in price at very specific levels, understanding the psychology behind why investors are behaving in certain ways is part of that process. Dr. Daniel Crosby is an excellent resource for investors looking to learn more about themselves and investor psychology. In this conversation we discuss the cognitive behavior...

The market is never going to give us what we want. We have to take what the market gives us. Play the hand we're given, not the hand we wish we had. What worked in one market environment is not going to work in another. That's why all those filters fail so frequently, because you're trying to take something from the market instead of taking what it is giving us.

This week, a spike in volatility caused forced selling in stock index vehicles that trickled down to ETFs and individual stocks. We did not see any stress, however, in credit markets, currencies or any of the commodities like Crude Oil or Gold. This is further evidence that we want to continue be buyers of weakness, like we have been throughout all of last year and most of 2016. There will be periods where we want to be sellers of strength, but I don't believe that is the correct approach today.

I thought this would be a good time to share some of my thoughts on position sizing. I've noticed this week many people who never mentioned a futures contract are now opining on the futures market at all hours of the night. I know what that feels like. I've been there. 2008 was an amazing experience for me. It's not the lifestyle that I want to live. Sleeping at night is healthy. If my positions are too big, I'm not sleeping.

To me, the key to avoiding bad decisions is to keep stress and emotional levels low. It's hard to do that when there is too much money involved for you to handle responsibly. So we want to identify how much is too much. It's not an easy answer and most likely something you'll learn over time. When you get that feeling like you've just been punched in the stomach, you're probably too big. You'll know it when you feel it. Most of us have been there, multiple times. 

If you've been following along, I try and go out of my way to discuss risk management techniques, tools and signals when the market gives them to us. Whenever I lay out a thesis, I like to talk about what the market should look like in the case that we are correct, while at the same time outlining what the environment would look like if we are wrong. The idea is to picture both scenarios and as the data comes in, try to identify which outcome we're in as quickly as possible.

Based on what we saw in some of the volatility related products this week, it's clear someone got squeezed, or a bunch of someones. There was big money leaning in the other direction clearly. We've seen this sort of market behavior regularly - last April/May, then again in August. This was more extreme and most likely not the last time it happens. This is becoming normal. These leveraged products are a real risk when they all get squeezed simultaneously, there are forced liquidations. We saw elevated levels of volatility throughout the 90s and stocks kept rallying for years. So we can have volatility and rising...

It's not a secret that Emerging Markets were the big loser for a long time. Since peaking during the 2010-2011 time period, the underformance of anything EM, Mining and Natural Resources has been clear to all of us. Gold was a terrible investment, mining stocks, stocks in mining countries and others in that area had been the worst place to put your money for many years. Although still not in a full fledged parabolic rise, we've seen what appears like a healthy completion of a massive base.

To me, this is suggesting that the outperformance we've been seeing out of Emerging Markets is just getting started. The initial burst from early 2016 was more of a beta trade. This is when stocks as an asset class bottomed and the worst of the worst, emerging markets in this case, outperformed because of their higher volatility nature and the simple fact that, the harder the pounce, the more violent the bounce. We've gone nowhere the past 15 months since that initial thrust of the lows. Until now.