I'm out in Seattle this week to speak at the stockcharts.com ChartCon 2018.  Excited to be a part of a conference that features many speakers that I consider mentors, including Greg Morris, Martin Pring, and Tom McClellan. So far we've heard from Greg Schell, Dr. Alexander Elder, and Bruce Fraser.  What struck me is that all three of them have discussed the importance of using stops.

It's so easy to reduce Behavioral Finance to a bottomless list of biases.  As with many aspects of the financial industry, we get way too focused on labeling things instead of understanding them. A recent article from Behavioral Scientist pointed out the limitations of defining Behavioral Economics (which I tend to use interchangeably with "Behavioral Finance" because as far as I'm concerned they're the same thing) as a series of fallacies.

Predicting the future direction of the markets is 1) really difficult, 2) never about certainties, and 3) all about probabilities. Because of those three truths, I like to focus on price itself.  As legendary technical analyst and mentor Ralph Acampora once said, "The only thing you can't restate is price." Three charts in my daily routine have started to turn from bullish to bearish, suggesting caution in the coming weeks and months.

Slowly but surely chipping away at my Pocket queue, I came across an article entitled "If You're Too Busy for These 5 Things, Your Life is More Off Course Than You Think."  An article combining mindfulness with aviation was pretty much custom written for me!

Two themes stand out as I review the charts this week.  First, the leadership of the supersized MANIA names that seem to dwarf everything else.  Second, charts in the Financials sector that have been notable underperformers over the last six weeks.  Let's review both of themes and let the charts tell the story.

Two recent articles caused me to think about how social media has affected communication.  More importantly, I've thought about how I can best use social media along with other modes of communication to grow personally and professionally.

At a recent meeting of the Northern Ohio Chapter of the CMT Association, we had a roundtable discussion where each attendee shared a best idea. One of the junior members of the gathering gave a rather dire outlook for stocks, followed by the remark, "I've never traded a bear market before."

In honor of Independence Day, I wanted to share four books that bring key periods in American history to light.  This is by no means a "top four" list, as many books arguably deserve a spot.  This is simply a list of books I've read recently that are worthy of your attention.

I regularly scroll through all the charts in the S&P 500 as part of my research process.  Technical analysts that I respect a great deal convinced me of the value of this routine, which tends to increase your market awareness and decrease your vulnerability to market movements.

I wrote an article back in November highlighting the way that ETFs are often launched once an investment thesis has become way oversubscribed.  We looked at the recent example of the ProShares Decline of the Retail Store ETF, ticker EMTY (no kidding).  Can you guess what happened next?