The way I learned it, "The bigger the base, the higher in space". In other words, the longer prices consolidate in a narrow range, the more powerful the ultimate resolution. I think we have a good example of this type of behavior in the...
One of the things that I take most pride in is my ability to keep an open mind and consider every outcome. This goes for all markets, not just stocks. But today I have a solid if/then scenario that I think every U.S. stock market bull should be...
Since late March and early April, most of the major stock market indexes around the world, U.S. included, consolidated in a sideways range. The dilemma/argument among my friends and I was in which direction would these consolidation resolve? As it...
One of the biggest reasons why we've been hesitant to be bullish of stocks, particularly as an asset class, since early April is because of the severe underperformance from bank stocks. Not only do we need participation out of Financials during bull...
Both American Express and Goldman Sachs have been serious under-performers off both the August 2015 and January 2016 lows when the broader market put in major bottoms. While there...
We all have the freedom and ability to focus on any part of the financial markets that we want. Some people get paid to gossip about the federal reserve and others get paid to make money in the market. We all have different objectives. If you're...
When you talk about the "stock market", there is so much more to it than the S&P500 or what the Dow did on a given day, week or month. These are just 2 popular indexes in the most popular country in the world. But in reality, that's all they...
Relative Strength is something that I take very seriously. When markets are falling, we want to look for stocks holding up the best. That is what we call relative strength and tends to lead us towards the future leaders for ensuing rallies. It's the...
One of the most valuable exercises throughout my process is going through every single country around the world looking at both weekly and daily charts. One by one I make my annotations and take my notes. This is certainly time consuming, but the...
One of the most valuable tools we have as technicians is the ability to go through every single stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and every sector and sub-sector in the S&P500 so that we can weigh all of the evidence. It might take some...
When we talk about the most important developments in the world today, we need to define who we are and why this is the case for us. We are market participants who have only one goal: to make money in the market. There are many others out there who...
The debate about whether Amazon is in the Technology Sector or the Consumer Discretionary sector is really a pointless one. It isn't anyone's opinion that Amazon is in the Consumer Discretionary Sector. Amazon IS in the Consumer...
The Stock Market has gone no where in 6 weeks since we originally wanted to take profits on all of the long positions we were laying out in late January and early February. During this period of no advance, we have seen a massive deterioration in...
As we all know, the S&P500 is a cap-weighted index. In other words, the largest companies by market capitalization (AAPL, XOM ,MSFT, FB etc) represent the largest percentage weighting in the index. The bigger the company, the more important it is...
There has been a lot of talk about how the recent rally has been accompanied by a dramatic improvement in market breadth, so I took the time to see if the data I track supported that...
Contrary to popular belief, we're not here to be right. We're only here to make money. As market participants, we're not journalists or economists or side analysts. It's their job to be "right". So when they're wrong, they like to call it a "revision...
The semiconductor index has likely caused both longs and shorts a bit of angst over the past several weeks as it failed to make any directional progress near the top of its 10-month...
When the major U.S. Stock market indexes are making new highs, you want to see the list of stocks making new highs increasing along the way as well. This had certainly been the case throughout February and March, but has come to a complete halt this...
Utilities have been the monster in the U.S. Stock Market this year. While some sectors, like in the metals or energy space, have bounced back from horrific downtrends, others have kind of just muddled around, like Financials for example. Utilities, on...
I think a really important concept that too often gets overlooked is the power of keeping an open mind. Why must we stick to a bearish or bullish stance? What is wrong with neutral sometimes? Just because our upside get hit, does that mean we need to...
Once a week I do my Global Macro review where I annotate and take notes on every country's index around the world. This analysis is on multiple timeframes so we focus on both the weekly timeframe going back 7-10 years and the daily timeframe over the...
This week I was over at the Nasdaq in Times Square discussing the current market environment with Frances Horodelski on Canada's Business News Network. The weight of the evidence is suggesting a cautious stance up here after all of our upside targets...