It's that time of the year again. They all keep calling and emailing me asking for my "predictions" for 2020.

What do you want me to say?

I have no way of knowing what's in store for next year, yet alone what to expect in December of 2020. And I think it's really important to reiterate that. This idea of the unknown unknowns gets lost in the shuffle.

Sure, we were fortunate to make some good calls this year. Our customers have only sent us positive feedback. But as Babe Ruth once said, "Yesterday's home runs don't win today's games".

The BRICKS are breaking out, but India is being left behind due to a lack of breadth. Large-Caps continue to perform, but when they pause there are not enough stocks to pick up the slack...so what we get is a messy, choppy 2-year range in the Nifty 500.

As a result, we've been focusing on the stocks showing relative strength...making money on the long side by sticking with the names that continue to trend, and playing the short side when the reward/risk is ridiculously skewed in our favor.

Unfortunately, it looks like we're going to close out the year/decade with the same gameplan as charts like the one below are a symptom of the weak breadth problem India's had for two years.

This week, and really until Monday January 6th is a period of time I often refer to as "Garbage Time."

This time between Christmas and New Years' Day in the markets is a time to clean out the garbage in your portfolio. Many tax-savvy investors like to close out losing positions to help offset gains realized elsewhere. Other than this activity, there really isn't any benefit to beginning any new positions during this time.

Of course, last year was the exception that proves the rule.

In my opinion, the reason people have been so bearish towards stocks and fighting strong trends is because they're allowing other biases influence their decision making. Whether they don't agree with the Fed, or the Trump, the direction of the Economy, or whatever it is, they're choosing to give more weight to these "opinions" than they do to price itself.

Fortunately for us, we're 100% data driven. So we don't care who the president is. We ignore everything the fed says and does. We assume anything a journalists creates is gossip, whether it is or isn't. And we certainly don't have time to care what the economy is doing.

So because we are so trained to focus on actual data, it's a lot easier for us to ignore those whose job it is to distract us. It's not "easy", but it's definitely easier for us as technicians than it is for most of society. The fact is most people are unaware, or choose not to care, that they're consuming content produced by those with ulterior motives. They're just here to sell ads to their sponsors while we're only trying to make money in the market. It's a big difference, and it becomes a problem.

So what we do is try to...

It's been a while since we've issued a Precious Metals update, so today we wanted to reiterate our risk management levels and targets on both the weekly and daily timeframes.

As we all let Holiday dinners settle this week, and after the holiday cocktails begin delivering the desired effect, eventually old Uncle Morty will start pontificating about every thing that is wrong in America. Everyone's got that one Uncle (or aunt, grandfather, brother-in-law, etc).

The undisputed fact is that life on Planet Earth has never been better. In fact, it gets better every year. Are there problems? Are there people at the short end of the stick? Of course. Humankind will never achieve perfection. There is no such thing. But the undeniable fact is that life and mankind is getting better, on the whole, for everyone.

What hurts my heart

I was down Philly last week chatting with Wharton Professor Jeremy Siegel, WisdomTree's Jeremy Schwartz and Tim Hussar of WhartonHill. This was a lot of fun and I thought we had a great discussion about what to expect for stocks and bonds in 2020. PHD Liqian Ren was also there and asked some great questions about rotation into emerging markets and how we try to incorporate alternative data into our analysis.

This was my first time visiting the Wharton School and it did not disappoint.

Hopefully I wasn't too hard on Professor Siegel and Tim Hussar and they invite me back on sometime!

This episode was live on SiriusXM and will be replayed several times over the holidays, but here is the podcast version of it so you can give it a listen at your convenience:

One of the things that stuck out to me during this weekend's chart review was the Nifty Private Index, particularly on a relative basis.

Let's take a look at the chart and what's happening with it.

I love how people still think we're in a 10-year bull market for stocks. This lack of understanding of basic reality is one of the many catalysts, I believe, that will take stocks much much higher.

The greatest trick the market ever pulled was convincing investors it's been in a decade long bull market.

The best part is that nothing could be further from the truth.

When we talk about "Stocks", we have to recognize that "Stocks" are an asset class. It doesn't just mean the S&P500 or Dow Jones Industrial Average. This is a global stock market, and becoming more of one with every day that passes. Those of you who have been reading our work for years know how valuable that information has been to us for so long. Today is no different.

Look at Europe doing nothing for 2 decades and now starting a new bull market:

Before we get in to stocks and charts, I just want to thank you for your support all these years. It really means a lot to me. Today I noticed I had 61.8K followers on Twitter! How about that? Leonardo Fibonacci would be proud!

This was my first week back living on the east coast. My 2-year plan to be in California turned into 4.5 beautiful years in Sonoma Valley. This was after spending 15 years total in the northeast between college in Fairfield, CT and over a decade in New York City.

I keep getting asked, "But JC why would you ever go back???" (this is happening at least several times each day).

The truth is that it was always the plan. It just took longer than we had anticipated because life is good out there! It also...

Tom Bruni is out with a bullish post on Beyond Meat $BYND that has whetted my appetite for an options trade.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

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

Most people were buyers of this one...and most thought it was a stock-related chart, but it wasn't. Try again next week.

Anyway, let's take a look.