With Chart Summit India now almost a month in the rearview, I finally found some time to go back and rewatch some of the presentations.
Together with our partners, we hosted 20 amazing speakers and thousands of attendees and raised a remarkable amount of money to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a really great event and an honor to be a part of.
With over 10 hours of content from some of the market's top technicians, I won't be able to do them all justice in just a short blog post so I highly encourage you to go watch all the full presentations for yourself. They can be accessed for free here.
With that said I'll try and do my best. Bruni recently wrote a post about some of his main takeaways from the conference which you can read here. I'm going to build on that today and share some of the things I found valuable from the handful of presentations I recently went back and watched.
When the picture isn't clear on the timeframe you're trading, it generally helps to zoom out one, or even two timeframes above it to gain some clarity around the primary trend.
Today we're going to compare and contrast the action in Gold/Silver and Natural Gas/Crude Oil to highlight this exact concept.
There aren't too many charts in the Equity Markets breaking out of decade-long bases on an absolute basis right now...
This week's Mystery Chart was though, and the vast majority of you were buying it against former resistance turned support. We agree with that approach and would be doing the same here.
Thanks as always to all those who participated, but there's just one catch...
The chart was inverted! This means most of you were actually selling the breakdown in the Latin America 40 ETF (ILF).
When we talk about "Precious Metals", it can mean a lot of things. You've got the metals like Gold and Silver, which are behave very differently at times, and you have the stocks with all sorts of market capitalizations. There are a lot of ways to describe the precious metals space, so let's get into a little bit of that today.
Here is a chart of what this group looks like this year. Notice the outperformance from the Gold Miners Index Fund, almost twice the performance of the metal itself. The little guys and silver in general didn't perform nearly as well:
There has been a lot of talk about the potential implications on the broader market if Mega-Cap Growth and Technology stocks were to lose their leadership. Since they have been responsible for driving much of the gains in the major averages for years now... we can only ask ourselves, who might pick up the slack if and when this happens?
In this post, we're going to analyze the top-performing areas today and compare them to their strength before the market crashed in February and March.
We'll also look at the leaders from back then and see how they're holding up today.
This will give us an idea of whether we really are undergoing a change in leadership or not, and if so, where the new areas of strength are.
The broader markets are starting to show signs that we may be setting up for some sideways-to-down chop.
And one sector that is likely giving investors fits is the financials. During this recent "recovery," $XLF has continually been underperforming relative to the S&P. JC shared this chart today highlighting this observation:
With Financials, arguably America's most important sector, making lower lows relative to the rest of the market, it's hard to see them emerge as new leaders. New decade+ relative lows in $XLF is not what you want to see if you think the stock market is going a lot higher. It's actually the opposite.
I look at Regional Banks and wonder, Is this a major bottom? Or is this just a normal consolidation within an ongoing trend? So then I look at momentum in a bearish regime, and its parent sector, Financials, breaking down to the lowest levels relative to the S&P500 since March of 2009:
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?
As Market Technicians, we don't like catching falling knives. Today we want to reiterate several areas of the market that we either want to stay away from completely or even be shorting if you're into that sort of thing.
Plus we'll add a new index sector to our watchlist that's in danger of becoming a "falling knife" of its own.
Here's the leader of the weakest stocks, Nifty PSU Banks, breaking down to new all-time lows on an absolute basis. When bullish momentum divergences fail to spark any sort of upside traction, that shows that sellers are remaining aggressive even at lower prices and that the downtrend remains firmly intact. If prices are below their recent lows of 1,220 then we're looking for further downside towards 1,010.
Gold (GLD) broke out of a multi-year base last year and has more or less been trending higher since. No new news there.
But as JC explained in a post last week, Gold Miners (GDX) have finally broken out of a 7-year base as well after recently taking out resistance at key prior highs.
Today we're going to take a deeper look at the space.
We love setups like the one in Gold Miners right now. Not only did GDX resolve higher from a massive base but there is also a hefty amount of price memory at the breakout level which should act as solid support going forward.
Click on chart to enlarge image.
Our risk management level for GDX is 31 and as long as we remain above that level we think 43 is next and over the long-term price will likely test its 2011 all-time highs at 62. But we'll worry about that once it matters. We need to get to 43 first.
Jeff deGraaf is one of those analysts who influenced me very early on. Something I've always admired about him is how much emphasis he puts on first identifying what type of market environment we're in, before then giving more or less weight to different tools and indicators. This is one of those important steps that I think gets forgotten quite often when you see investors trying to always incorporate a certain strategy or approach regardless of the environment. In this episode, Jeff compares this stock market crash, and subsequent recovery, to others in the past including 1987. He does a nice job of incorporating what is currently taking place in Bonds and Gold into his analysis for stocks. I think there are a lot of great lessons in this conversation with, who I believe, is one of the best Technical Analysts in the world today.