I’m glad that you guys are enjoying the weekly letters that I’ve been putting out since last month. Thanks again for all the great feedback you’ve been giving me via email or twitter and stocktwits.

This week I wanted to take this to another level and have us all jump on a free conference call to go over what I think are the 10 most important charts in the world. This includes US Stocks, International Markets, Commodities including Metals and Energy, Currencies and US Interest Rates. We will also leave plenty of time for specific questions and chart requests from attendees. [Read more…]

If you know anything about me you know that I can’t stand when prices are near a flat 200 day simple moving average. It’s not that I want to short stocks in those situations. I don’t want anything to do with them at all. You’re signing up for a headache, I’m telling you. Breakouts tend not to hold and breakdowns usually don’t hold either. The reason is that there is no trend when prices are near a flat 200 day moving average. Markets trend by nature, but when they’re in this particular situation, they don’t. Why would you bother with the one scenario where you know markets are not trending?

I think the S&P500 is a great example of why we want to stay away when price is near a flat 200 day. Headline writers like to make a big deal when price breaks above or below this particular smoothing mechanism, but 99% of the time they fail to mention the direction in which that moving average is heading. Is it upward sloping, downward sloping or flat? This is the more important question to ask. Not that price got above an invisible line today. [Read more…]

When you talk about some of the most valuable tools for market participants, there are very few out there better than the community that is Stocktwits. One of the most difficult things to do is consistently avoid the noise that surrounds the market and changes in the prices of stocks, commodities and currencies. There are too many commentators and headline writers that get paid to make noise and not to try to make money in the market. This increases noise levels and makes it difficult for the average investor to differentiate between what is real and what are click-bait, air-time filling exaggerations. What I love about the Stocktwits platform is that you can curate your own stream. You follow who want to follow and ignore who you need to avoid. If there are users just creating noise and not adding any real value, you don’t have to worry. We have the advantage of only seeing information from the users we want to hear from. The noisemakers eventually get booted out anyway. It’s a great community and today I wanted to share with you guys who some of my favorite follows are on the platform.

Here is my list in no particular order: [Read more…]

This has to be one of the more hilarious things that smart people say all the time: “The problem with technical analysis is that it only looks at information from the past”. This, to me, is a classic case of nonconcious human mimicry. Some of that research in this area of psychology is fascinating to me as humans tend to mirror the behavior patterns of others. In this example, it’s clearly just people repeating something that they once heard, and not something they’ve actually thought through. I mean, come on. The problem with technical analysis is that it only looks at information from the past? As opposed to what? Information from the future? [Read more…]