Why is my chaos resistance in the red?

I guess I must be missing some aspect to the game, because I'm a little confused regarding why my chaos resistance is currently in the red - it's actually showing as minus 12. I thought something in my inventory must have been penalizing it so I removed everything from my build to see what the problem was - nothing! Stayed at minus 12. Now this is weird, because amongst my current gear are rings and pieces giving percentage increases to ALL resistances, yet when I put them back in place I still get the same minus figure. I've looked at my skill tree to see if there's something in there that's causing the issue but I can't find anything.

What am I missing folks?

Chaos resist starts at -60% on Merciless difficulty, and is only increased by nodes/gear that states "ALL resistances", or chaos resist obviously, as you said. I'm over halfway through Act 3 (rushed) and have -42% chaos resist :)

Edit: 99% sure things stating "All ELEMENTAL resists" don't include chaos

Ah, that explains it. A built in penalty, eh? Thanks for that. I guess I just never noticed when I kicked over into Cruel. Back to the drawing board as far as my rings/amulet combo are concerned!

he is in cruel, has 0 chaos res on gear and took +8chaos res node between templar and witch.

normal 0 resist
cruel -20
merciless -60

You don't need to max chaos res. If you keep it at the value you're at you'll be fine, even on merciless.

Yeah, chaos resist is "fine" if it's around zero. More doesn't hurt, but it's difficult to fit it in. It's the least common damage type and can often be avoided, too (walking out if poison clouds, manually dodging chaos projectiles, not stepping on bombs, etc.).