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Good Tuesday afternoon everyone. We hope you had a nice three-day weekend, but it's time to get back to work so let's just dive in.

Yes, the market logged another gain today - the third one in a row. It was a tepid effort, however, marked by increasingly weaker progress and increasingly weaker volume. Take a look.

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Well ladies and gents, there it is. Stocks have been toying with it for days now (and arguably toying with it for weeks). It finally happened today though... the market broke through a major ceiling, and as a result is now technically in the midst of a breakout. It remains to be seen how long it's going to last, and I'll be the first to say it makes me nervous. We have to take the clues we get at face value though, which means the stocks are back in an uptrend.

We'll obviously look at it in detail today. Before we get to our dissection of the market's current condition, however, we do want to take a quick look at last month's retail sales data published this morning.

Retail Spending is Actually Quite Firm

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Well folks, you don't need me to tell you things are getting real interesting for the market. It looks like the bulls are defying the odds, standing ready to break out when the time is right. In fact, technically speaking, the S&P 500 broke out today. It's certainly not the ideal scenario for a rally (valuation concerns, mostly), but many fortunes are won and lost when -- and maybe even because -- the market's behaving irrationally.

The first thing we need to do is pause for a moment and let you know today's newsletter is largely an homage to today's Elite Opportunity newsletter. I was going to show you the chart I'm going to show you anyway, as the things I thought were curious and worth noting were also the things John Monroe thought were curious and worth noting. But, John added a little something to his take that I'm not going to be able to touch on.

First things first. Take a look at our updated chart of long-term bonds (TLO), gold (GLD), the U.S. dollar (DXY), and 30-year treasury yields (TYX). You may recall when we last looked at these instruments on February 3rd how we saw hints of reversals on most of these fronts.... bonds and yields in particular. We've not been disappointed.