If you're of the mind that the broader stock market is set to top out soon, then it makes sense to start hunting for short selling opportunities amongst the weakest sectors. One sector ripe for this right now is the shipping sector. And one stock in particular is offering a rare opportunity to play the downside with straight long puts.

One of the most valuable parts of my entire process is going through my workbook of Monthly Charts (only) at the end of each month. It's easy to get lost in the day-to-day noise, but this exercise forces us to identify the direction of the primary trend.

During my review, there are always a few of them that stand out. Today I want to point out what’s happening in Americas largest sector. This is a chart of the Technology Index Fund $XLK successfully retesting those March 2000 highs and trying to rip higher:

With a new month comes a fresh batch of Monthly Candlesticks. As you are all well aware, I find this exercise to be incredibly valuable. It forces us to identify the direction of the primary trend.

Today we got new Monthly Candlesticks and while updating the chartbook for our Premium Members, I couldn't help but think the chart below describes the environment we're currently in quite well.

Today we got new Monthly Candlesticks. We wrote a free post on the biggest theme from this month, but this post will go through a few more charts that stood out.

We're headed into another monthly expiration cycle and its time to take some action on open positions with options expiring in March. Not going to sugar coat it -- March positions have been challenging!

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Finding things to short on an absolute basis has been tough since December, however, Shipping stocks appear to be presenting an attractive reward/risk for those looking to express a bearish thesis in the market.

Howard Lindzon has always been there for me. He is the founder of Stocktwits, who originally built Allstarcharts.com back in 2010 and welcomed me into their network of bloggers. Many of these are still around today and doing better than ever!

Howard has invested in some of my ventures over the years and I've invested in a few of his. He keeps me posted on developments in the private markets and I keep him up to speed on public markets.

Last week was the ...

Chart Summit was a "Ski during the day and Chart at night" event held on February 22-23, 2019 in Breckenridge, CO. I co-hosted it with Brian Shannon and this is the video of my presentation:

The Top/Down Approach to Financial Markets using Technical Analysis

If there is any group out there that is feeling the frustration, it's the gold bug community. Gold is at the same price today that it was a year ago, 5 years ago and 8 years ago. During that time frame, the S&P500 has more than doubled. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up more that 14,000 points, again more than doubling during this period.

Even U.S. Treasury Bonds made money as interest rates collapsed. The bond ETF $TLT was up over 60% before retracing some of that over the past couple of years. But still, up substantially and clearly outperforming precious metals.

You could have literally been in anything other than these commodities and made money. But from epic frustration comes secular periods for profit. I think this is what we have here:

Don't look now, but all-time highs are starting to pop up for some well known names. And after just completing the "hundred-dollar-roll," we've got an old classic offering us a cheap opportunity to play for some outsized relative gains.