This week we have a special treat on the podcast. Denise Shull is a Performance Coach and founder of The ReThink Group.  She is widely believed to be the inspiration for the character Wendy Rhoades on the Showtime series Billions. We have a lot of different perspectives on the podcast all revolving around the behavior of the market and its participants. In this episode we focus more on the behavior of the participants themselves and why traders do the things they do. Denise shares stories about different clients she has and the ways they overcome things like loss aversion, being too aggressive and not being aggressive enough. We discuss the differences between male and female traders, the advantages women have in this field and reasons why there are so few women on Wall Street. I really enjoyed this conversation because I think it's important to understand that there are real humans on the other side of our trades. Even if they are algos built by humans, the people are still there and it's important to understand their side. One...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

In early July we were looking at some divergences that were signaling a potential short-term bottom in US Interest Rates.

That thesis was quickly proven wrong as global yields pulled the US down with them, and last week in our Conference Call we discussed our current outlook for Bonds and their many intermarket relationships.

Earlier this week JC discussed the fact that Bonds are at an interesting level relative to the S&P 500 as well.

Yesterday I discussed some of the pitfalls to avoid when using Bond ETFs as a proxy for the underlying assets.

Needless to say, we've been talking a lot about Bonds.

In this post, I'm going to take a simplified look at price action and momentum of the 2, 5, 10, and 30-Year Treasuries to assess the reward/risk and if there's a short-...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Tuesday's Mystery Chart is one of my favorite charts right now, so thank you all for your feedback and participation.

Almost every one of you said you were selling the stock in question as it put in a failed breakout, while a handful of you were doing nothing and buying the subsequent breakout with me.

With that as our backdrop, let's get into it.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

This week I've seen a chart of High Yield relative to Investment Grade Bonds floating around with various conclusions, but I wanted to use this to highlight some things to consider when using Bond ETFs as a proxy for what's happening in the market it's meant to track.

Assets in the strongest uptrends not only do well on an absolute basis, they tend to outperform relative to their alternatives as well. In the case of the S&P500, with new all-time highs last month, we've just seen lower highs relative to both Gold and US Treasury Bonds. This is NOT evidence of a strong uptrend.

The question today seems clear to me: Is the underperformance of stocks relative to other assets "The Divergence" that we'll point to in the future as the heads up that something was changing? Or will we get relative rotation back into equities and this was just a temporary blip while stocks consolidated their massive 2016-2017 gains?

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?

In this Episode of Allstarcharts Weekly, Steve and I talk about US Small-caps and the underperformance we've seen out of anything non-large-cap since 2018. We are now down to levels not seen since early 2016 when Small-caps started their outperformance vs Large-caps, which is where stocks bottomed after the 2015 cyclical bear market. Is this where the turn begins? Let's walk through it together and see if we can figure it out!

Here is the video from my BNN Bloomberg interview this week. They asked me if I thought the media was making too big of a deal out of an inversion of the yield curve and I agreed that of course they did. That's what the media does, irresponsibly exaggerate things that don't need to be exaggerated at the expense of their audience. I'm happy to come on TV to bring some sense of reality to the conversation. Someone has to. In this video we discuss the ongoing Cyclical Bear Market in stocks and what we're waiting for to confirm that a new Cyclical Bull is getting started.

What is the best chart in the world right now? I don't know. I guess that really depends on your time horizon, risk tolerance and overall market goals. These are different for all of us.

Today, I want to share what I think are collectively the 120 best charts. The way I see, there is no ONE chart that can tell today's story. But as a unit, these 120 slides give us a good look at the current market environment.

One of the most important concepts we talk about in Technical Analysis is confirmation.

Whatever thesis we have, we need price to confirm it before we can act...and if it doesn't then we need to respect that and get out of the way.

Risk management is our main priority and two simple charts do a great job of highlighting why we wait for confirmation.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Tuesday's Mystery Chart is one of my favorite charts right now, so thank you all for your feedback and participation.

I received a lot of answers, but I'd say 1/3 of you were buying a breakout, 1/3 were fading this strength, and the last 1/3 were yawning and off to find something more exciting.

With that as our backdrop, let's get into it.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Last night was our Members-Only Conference Call where we discussed the major themes we're seeing across asset classes.

A big theme was the lack of direction within Equities and last month's failed breakout to new highs in the US as we "catch down" to some of the weakness we're seeing globally.

As a result, today I want to revisit an exercise I performed in late May when the environment was pretty similar to today...and that was to look for stocks with "big bases."