Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Probabilities

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I don't think there's a person on the planet that doesn't want a sensible, calm market to return. This is getting more insane every day. The VIX almost went into the triple digits today. You can see by the candlestick, and the huge shadow lines, how completely uncertain and volatile everything is.

As I've been mentioning, there are signs that things may be getting ready to turn around, at least for a little while. The battered Eurodollar is basing a bit.

And the even more-battered gold is at technically significant levels to suggest a bounce.

Crude oil, only a few months thought to be headed toward $200, is at its 25% median line, thus providing a possible bounce to $80 or even $90.

As for the equity markets, these are at extremes too. Witness the $MSH, which is getting near its own retracement level.

And the NASDAQ 100 has its entire Fibonacci fan structure from 2002 as a "backstop', given the lows reached today.

Need another example? Here's the $MID, pushing right up against its retracement and supported by a large amount of trading activity from 2000-2002.

As you can probably divine, I am position for (a) high energy (b) higher equities. I am not ruling out the possibility of one more severe leg down, and I sold some NQ after the close today at a little over 1250 to hedge myself for this possibility. But, by and large, I think we are close to a bottom for the year. I find the bullish prospects for commodities especially interesting. Although I don't intend to trade wheat, I find this major commodity to be an interesting proxy:

I only "discovered" the UDN and UUP equities this week, thanks to Slopers, and I own a large quantity of puts on UUP (in other words, I am expecting the dollar to fall).

 

The whole subject of commodities is a bit of a challenge, because on one hand it's easy to consider them severely "oversold" (whatever that means……….) but on the other, looking at this $CRX graph, there is no technical basis for support. So all we're due for at some point is a technical point. But in terms of price action, there is virtually no "plateau" available to hold this up.

For those of you who have been suffereing the data problems in MarketMatrix or ProphetCharts this week, understand that I feel your pain. I use this stuff too, and it's maddening for me to be seeing these problems. I don't usually use this blog as a place for technical updates, but I know many of you use ProphetCharts and – – for intraday graphs and live quotes – – have seen many problems the past few days. We are deploying some changes this afternoon which may give us a better Friday. We won't know for sure until the trading day begins, but we have been working almost around-the-clock on these issues. Obviously we're not going to quite until we know everything is working smoothly.

Are We Done?

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You have never………ever……….seen a person enter orders so fast in your life.

I'm going to do a post later once the dust has settled (the closing bell just rang), but my bullishness toward energy and bearishness toward the dollar seems to have been the right way to go.

As for equities………I have gone long QLD and SSO, but I won't be convinced until (a) we push above today's highs (b) we push our way out of this triangle.

We still have the risk of "falling away" down from the red line I've drawn.

I would also point out that the EUR/USD is finally starting to show some signs of basing and turning up (e.g. turning the dollar downward).