Bull market? Bear market? Sideways market? That is the question on everyone's minds.

We've put together the five most important charts we're monitoring to help answer that question.

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.

Click on chart to enlarge view. 

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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.

JC recently posted some of the best charts from our US Chartbook, so I wanted to share those along with some of the best charts from our India Chartbook.

Let's take a look at what's going on in the major asset classes.

Let's start with Bonds. Here's the US 10-Year Note Futures printing their highest monthly close in history, clearly in an uptrend. The Bond market remains in an uptrend both in the US and most markets around the globe.

Click on chart to enlarge view. 

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

For the week ended Friday, May 1, 2020:

Every weekend we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

This week we're highlighting the underperformance from the US using our Global Index and International ETF tables.

Click table to enlarge view.

Despite the Wilshire 5000 (DWC) closing slightly higher on the week, all major Large-Cap averages in the US closed lower. While equities sold off across the board to end the week, the Eurozone still managed to book a nice gain with the German Dax (DAXX) and Stoxx 50 (STOXX) up 4-5% each in what was a short week for much of the region.

The Nikkei 225 (NI) and Shanghai Composite (SSEC) each closed almost 2% higher in what was also a short week for much of Asia.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Now that April is in the books that old Wall Street adage of “Sell in May and Go Away” is making its annual tour around the world of financial media. The reason this is such a commonly rehearsed phrase this time of year is that it was one of many seasonality trends first introduced by Yale Hirsch in his book, The Stock Traders Almanac.

The theory is rooted in historical research which shows that stocks tend to experience their worst performance between the months of May and October. Alternatively, the best months of the year typically occur between November and April, which is what we're going to cover in this post.

Notice how significant the disparity in average return is between these two six month timeframes.

I can't believe it's already been two weeks since Chart Summit India. Together with our partners, we hosted 20 of the best speakers and thousands of participants to raise money for charities fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

There were more than 10 hours of content in one day, so today I went back through some of the presentations again and wanted to share some of the information I found valuable.

All of the speakers were great and the videos can be accessed for free at ChartSummit.com/India, so we'd highly encourage you all to check them out. There's a lot of knowledge to benefit from.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

There has been a lot of chatter about the outperformance from Health Care recently. One of the industry groups benefitting from this strength has certainly been Biotechs so we're going to dive into that space today and take a look under the hood.

This week's Mystery Chart is a long-term ratio chart of the Nasdaq Biotech ETF (IBB) relative to the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ). Thanks to everyone for participating. Responses were pretty mixed this week as the chart is at a bit of an inflection point as it tries to hammer out a bottom at key prior lows from 2007-08 and 2011.

Monthly charts help us focus on the long-term trend when volatility on lower timeframes picks up.

In this environment there are a lot of messy, sideways charts out there, so we're going to look at the clearest trends and focus on those.

Yesterday we outlined the sector rotation that's occurring out of winners and into beaten-down stocks. Given the follow-through in US markets, we expect that to continue in India as well.

Since most of our upside risk management levels have been broken, our broader short thesis is no longer valid. The short-term momentum remains to the upside, so let's talk about what sectors will benefit and the next logical target for the major indexes.

If you are caught between a rock and a hard place, you are in a difficult situation where you have to choose between two equally unpleasant courses of action.

In many Indian stocks that is exactly where many market participants find themselves.

Let's take a look at why.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

New Mystery Chart!

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?