Do you live on the East coast and ever wonder what it would be like to be a trader on the West coast? Could you handle working on a much different schedule? In today's video, we chat with my pal Mehmet Gunay who I met during his time at SMB Capital when I lived in New York City. Today, he lives in San Francisco and seems to have adjusted pretty well to the time change and lifestyle. I would have to agree with him. I enjoy the west coast hours much better than when I lived in New York. The ability to do things after work with plenty of sun light left is very appealing.

We might be in a rangebound market for stocks, but one thing is for sure: the trend for Technical Analysis is up.

I've had a front row seat to the growth of this discipline and its practitioners for the past 15 years, since first starting my journey. I was half way through John Murphy's Technical Analysis of Financial Markets when I knew this was for me. Things only became more clear after that. As I read through Edwards & Magee and many other books, the way markets behaved just started making more and more sense.

When most of us think of bank stocks, we're generally not saying positive things. We have a bad taste in our mouth, particularly since early last year. But that's not the case in India.

Look at this chart. Which one is different?

Yesterday during our Members-Only Conference Call we discussed a lot of themes and trade ideas, but I wanted to highlight two charts that remain an issue for our bullish Equities thesis.

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir? ~ John Maynard Keynes

This quote has been on my mind as I am about to publish a trade idea that runs contrary to an existing position we're currently carrying. And if the Market Gods are smiling, we may be able to win on both of them!

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and eliminate the x and y-axes and and all labels eliminated to minimize bias. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. It can even be inverted or a custom index.

The point here is to not guess what it is, but instead to think about what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

The cool thing about working with smart people is being able to learn from them. Having Sean McLaughlin on our team has made everyone better, not just our clients but us as well. In today's video, we tackle the question of when it makes more sense to finance an options position by selling a different contract to collect the income vs simply just buying calls or puts. As usual, Sean does a nice job of explaining this in a way that anyone could understand.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Last week I had the pleasure of being on Real Vision TV where I recorded two segments, one on Bonds and Equities pairs trade (short EWJ/SPY).

The video to the Equities trade is here, but since I'm not sure if/when the free video about Bonds will be out I wanted to go through that trade for you all on the blog. And if the video does come out, I'll be sure to share it.

You've probably noticed a few recent blog posts and twitter comments from the All Star Charts team singing the praises of "cash". There's nothing wrong with cash as a position if there aren't any compelling ideas to get you excited about. In fact, its often the best move.

However, we options players can still structure trades that will profit in sideways markets. But a big challenge currently is that we prefer higher options prices driven by relatively high volatility to sell into -- and its hard to find that anywhere right now. Across the board, options prices are getting extremely compressed everywhere. What to do?

How about a strategy that positions us to benefit from sideways action while also getting a goose from any reversion to the mean (er, higher) volatility?

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Today there is no shortage of information: Social Media, Blogs, Newspapers, Television, Water-Cooler Gossip, etc., but we still have the same amount of time in a day. We all have to make a decision what we're going to pay attention to and what we're not.