From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaway:

• Friday’s rally needs follow-through to change the environment.
• Narrow strength and broad weakness producing more new lows than new highs.
• Yields pull back, but stress is building.

After Friday’s bounce, the Value Line Geometric index is at the same level that it was to begin 2021, which is also where it was to begin 2018. For those so inclined, it hasn’t been so much a buy-and-hold environment as it has a buy-and-hold-on-tight environment. While there have been pockets of strength along the way, they have not persisted. The challenge for the indexes right now is that the sectors that are seeing the best strength are relative lightweights. Between 60% to 80% of stocks in the Consumer Staples, Utilities and Energy sectors are trading above their 200-day averages (for the S&P 1500...

It's no secret that markets are dicey.  We're not revealing anything surprising here.

When markets are all over the place, it's good to have diversity -- not just diversity in instruments traded, but diversity in direction and strategy.

With this in mind, we're going to add another bearish position to our portfolio to help offer some balance to some of our long energy names.

 

The next new trade in our Paid-to-Play portfolio is:

The largest insider transaction on today's list is a Form 4 filing by George Lopez, founder and former CEO at ICU Medical $ICUI, who reported a $4 million purchase of his own stock.

We had two different insiders report purchases in the battered Bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy $MSTR.

Not much has changed in terms of the market trend. What we're observing keenly is if support levels hold in the short-term scenario. There are bouts of strength coming through in certain sectors and today's stock comes from the FMCG sector.

Do you know what we're talking about?

We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in 2020 to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.

This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.

Welcome to Paid to Play -- a unique window into a live trading account we manage for the express purposes of generating cash flow and adding diversification to our portfolio of trading strategies.

There are specific questions we seem to get regularly, so I thought I'd compile this FAQ ("frequently asked questions") doc to serve as an ongoing resource to all P2P subscribers.

In no particular order:

Over the years investors have come up with new and creative ways to lose money in the market.

But Silver just keeps helping investors do it the old fashioned way:

As you can see, Silver is down and making new 52-week lows.

And this brings up a bigger question.

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

The market is not a children's book.

I know sometimes we all kind of wish it was.

But it's not.

As investors, we can approach the market pretending it's one way, or we can approach it knowing it's the other.

That's up to you.

For us, we never even think about who is on the other side of our trades.

Why would we?

But it's something that's come up recently and probably worth addressing.

These are the registration details for our live mid-month conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

Our next Live Call will be held on Thursday May 19th at 6PM ET. 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 2015.

Here are the details for Thursday night:

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.