Editors Note: This article was originally published in John Murphy's Market Message on Thursday, June 14th at 11:39am EST. The Fed raised its short-term rate by a quarter point yesterday as expected. But it also added a fourth rate hike this year which gave its announcement a more hawkish tilt. That had the immediate effect of boosting Treasury bond yields and weakening bond...

The Industrials SPDR (XLI) has struggled in 2018 and is pretty much unchanged year-to-date. Despite flat performance this year, a pair of bullish continuation patterns are taking shape. Let's look at the key levels to watch going forward. Long-term, the trend is still up because the PPO(50,200,0) is positive, which means the 50-day EMA is above the 200-day EMA. The ETF also recorded a 52-week...

I ran some scans this morning looking for some new breakouts to 1-year highs. With the market pushing up for the last month, these food companies are starting to accelerate. First, Archer Daniels Midland is breaking out to new three year highs. Pinnacle Foods is breaking out above prior year highs. Nomad Foods (NOMD) has a nice chart that looks like it is starting to reaccelerate. If you...

It seems simple enough. Buy stocks/ETFs that are outperforming the benchmark S&P 500. Well, that's part of it for sure. But it really goes a lot deeper than that. StockCharts.com provides you a myriad of ways to evaluate relative strength. I tend to use relative ratios most of the time so I'll focus on this method in my article. As an example, let's

I have found over many years of trading that it is so much more difficult to make money shorting stocks than going long. With the exception of the Dot.com bubble between 2000-2002 and the bear market of 2008-2009 during the Great Recession we've been in a bull market for a long time and trying to short stocks in a bull market is like pulling teeth. However, just like it makes sense to

I’ve seen this play out time and time again at seminars, conferences, lectures, and courses. Remarkably, the conversation always begins with the exact same seemingly harmless five-word question: “But what if you just…” Those five words prompt me to step up on the soapbox and launch into the “tinkering talk”. A recurring discussion at...

On Friday, the weekly charts went "final". With that finalization, the NDX which had been carrying a positive Price Momentum Oscillator (PMO) crossover throughout the week, finally posted the IT PMO BUY signal on its DP Scoreboard. Additionally, sentiment charts were very interesting this week. The National Association of Active Investment Managers (NAAIM) posted the 3rd highest market exposure...

Relative Rotation Graphs® originally emerged out of my work on sector (rotation) analysis while employed as a sell-side analyst providing services to institutional clients. Shortly after the first introduction as a tool to visualize sector-rotation a lot of other possibilities to use RRGs sprung to mind. One of the first ideas was to use a Relative Rotation Graph at the highest level of an...