This is Part 2 of the 3rd Quarter Playbook for Members of Allstarcharts.com and focuses more on the Global Macro and Intermarket composition of the current environment. For more US Sector and Stock specific analysis, see Part 1.

Now that we're halfway through the year, it seems like an appropriate time to review market breadth both globally and within India to identify how we want to be positioned in equities during the second half of this year. In this post we'll do just that by looking at all of the global equity markets and Nifty sectors we track to determine their trend and momentum readings across multiple timeframes, so that we can come to a conclusion based upon the weight of the evidence.

With two weeks to July expiration, it's time to review our July positions that will be expiring soon and take any actions that are necessary to reduce risk or take profits. This is the time of the cycle when the theta cost of our long premium plays will start to accelerate against us, or the gamma risk in our short premium plays will start to ramp quickly against us. No bueno in either case.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Throughout April and May we've discussed market breadth improvements that have us bullish on equity prices both in the US and globally. Today I want to perform a simple exercise to see how the data we're looking at has developed over the last two months or so of trading.

With earnings for Apple coming up on July 31, there's just enough time, worthwhile juice, and a significant price level to lean against in order to potentially bite off some quick profits in $AAPL while limiting our downside risk. Since we don't have much time, lets cut right to the chase...

It is an honor to introduce the latest addition to our team here at Allstarcharts, Tom Bruni.

The running metaphors for Nike $NKE stock are too obvious, so I'll do my best to avoid them. However, it cannot be denied that last week's monster gap higher coming out of earnings has launched the stock around the final turn and it is now sprinting towards a big, fat, round number - $100. That big magnet coupled with a pretty common phenomenon called "post earnings drift" following positively received earnings events sets up a pretty compelling case for a profitable move setting up. 

Consumer Discretionaries have been a great indicator of market strength for a long time. This has been the best performing sector off the 2009 lows by a long shot, nearly doubling the performance of Tech, which has also been a monster. Discretionaries broke out to new highs in early 2012, well before the S&P500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average. With this sector breaking out to new all-time highs last month, it's hard to be bearish stocks.

This is Part 1 of the 3rd Quarter Playbook for Members of Allstarcharts.com and focuses on the U.S. Stocks Market. See Part 2 here.

Last month we introduced the newly added Monthly Chartbook in a post where we discussed the trends and perspectives seen through a long-term lens. Our conclusions were that many of our price objectives for the Nifty Sectors and Indices were hit and that a neutral approach was best in many cases. In that type of environment we wanted to focus our long trades in areas showing relative strength like large-cap Financial Services, IT, and Consumers Goods, while focusing our short trades in areas that were showing relative weakness, like mid and small-cap Infrastructure, Realty, and Metals stocks.

Register here for our live monthly conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts India.

July's Strategy Session will be held on Wednesday, July 6th at 7 PM IST. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with all of our past conference calls.

Here are the details for Tuesday:

Next week I will be sending out our Q3 playbook. Email me if you're not already a Premium Member. There are so many interesting things happening right now that I think there will be plenty of opportunities to make money next quarter, despite it supposedly being a slower time of the year.

When months close at 4PM ET, I can't help myself but hit those monthly charts right away. I am very disciplined about never looking at them before the month is completed. You get into bad habits like that. So I look forward to the monthly candlesticks being done:

Let's get right into it: