There's been lots of frustrating talk about companies with high share prices not splitting their stock. I tend to agree. While technically splitting shares of a stock doesn't do anything to enhance the value of your investment, it does help to provide greater liquidity for one to get into or out of a position quickly and at a fairer price.

But this is an argument for academics. We're just here to make money.

Perhaps you've seen JCs recently bullish post on Amazon $AMZN and you agree that you'd like to take a long position, but the high share price scares you?

How quickly people forget what a beast Amazon has been for years. All it took was an 18-month consolidation for investors to fall out of love with one of the greatest stocks in American history.

The bet the bears are making is that Amazon has been lagging and dragging down the Consumer Discretionary sector, considering it's 22% weighting in the index $XLY. So if you believe this is a big market top, I understand why you would think Discretionaries are setting up for a big fall. I totally get that.

Here's the chart:

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

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?

Mumbai is one of my favorite cities in the world. There is no question about it.

Last month I had the chance to take the boys out there for a week and show them why I love visiting there so much.

Here's a quick wrap up video about our experience:

People don't like it when I tell them we're near the beginning of a new bull market in stocks. For some reason, they prefer that cozy feeling of going to bed thinking stocks are near an important high, and they've somehow outsmarted the system by selling stocks in uptrends instead of buying them.

I'm convinced some of these people must be looking at their charts upside down.

Anyway, let's take a look at the markets so I can show you why I think we're closer to the beginning of a new bull market and not near the end of an old one:

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Mobile Payment stocks have been a key part of our focus on the Technology theme taking place across various sectors of the market.

Since the summer the space has cooled off a bit but is back at levels where it would make sense for the trend to reaccelerate to the upside.

Here's the Mobile Payments ETF vs S&P 500 ratio (IPAY/SPY) pulling back to trendline support. This looks like a normal pullback within a long-term uptrend, however, our concern is that momentum got oversold for the first time since mid-2016.

The strongest uptrends do not get oversold, but unfortunately, this one has so we need to watch if prices bounce from this level and resume their uptrend (preferably getting overbought once again) or if they roll over through support and make fresh lows.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

While we think the former situation is more likely, one way to mitigate our risk of being wrong...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Thank you to everyone who responded to this week's mystery chart.

Everyone was a seller of this one...and most thought it was an inverted chart, but it wasn't. Try again next week.

Anyway, let's take a look.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Copper has been getting a lot of attention as it hits 5-month highs, but there is another Base Metal chart that's not being talked about.

Today we're looking at that chart and then taking a more comprehensive approach at what's going on in the space.

Here's Copper making 5-month highs as momentum attempts to get overbought. The record net long position held by commercial hedgers continues, suggesting they think Copper prices can still head higher despite a more than 10% rally from the July failed breakdown.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

Stronger Copper is a good thing for Emerging Markets and reflects market participants pricing in stronger economic growth conditions.

Higher growth = greater demand for base metals = higher Copper and Base Metal prices. Or so the theory goes...

The chart not being...

I know what you're thinking? A bearish play? In this market?

Believe it or not, there are some weak sectors out there, and there's a stock we're bearish on that may have just exhausted itself in a last-gasp dead-cat bounce which may be soon reverse and resume its downward trend.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

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?

Annie Duke is the author of one of my favorite books, "Thinking In Bets". I often find myself recommending it to both colleagues and friends and family who aren't even in our business. While the book might be written by a poker player, and is somewhat about poker, it's really about the way we think, and this applies to market participation, but also life in general. It's a book I believe everyone should read, at least once.

In this podcast episode, I asked Annie about the differences between being humble in the face of the game we're playing vs being humble in the face of your opponent. This is a really important concept that really helps put things in perspective.

Behavioral Finance in general, as...

In this Episode of Allstarcharts Weekly, Steve and I discuss the less talked about tenets of Dow Theory. Everyone always likes to talk about the Dow Jones Industrial Average either confirming or diverging from the Dow Jones Transportation Average. But what gets forgotten is that there are many more tenets like Closing Prices are the most important, Identifying the direction of the Primary Trends and The Market Discounting Everything. Check out JC's 5 Most Important Dow Theory Tenets

This day and age we have other areas just as important, or even more important, than a group of Railroads, like what Charlie had when he first wrote down his Tenets in the late 1800s. Today we also compare the Dow Jones Industrial Average to the Semiconductor and Homebuilders Indexes as well as incorporate a series of ratios with Consumer Staples and Financials. It's more of an "and" than an "or" for us when it comes to Dow Theory.