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.

Gold: Yay! FAZ: Boo!

By -

My gold shorts are doing fantastically well. Now that $900 is broken, the odds are better than ever. I am holding on to every single one of these shorts.

FAZ, as the kids say, not so much. Obviously I wish I had the FAS (instead!) which I sold at $3.50 and has nearly doubled since then. The rallies in C and BAC will end, but Bank of America, for example, could get as high as $10 before collapsing again. Perhaps we should have paid more attention when everyone was clucking about C being a "penny stock." That day was the bottom (so far) for C.

If-Then Statements

By -

A trio of announcements to begin the day.

  1. We had record traffic yesterday – – over 91,000 page views. Cool! I'm not sure why. Maybe the world likes brooding bloggers;
  2. I'll be in a lot of meetings today, so my musings won't be quite as frequent (yes, yes, I know, I have no credibility with statements like that); 
  3. I think I mentioned getting entirely out of SRS yesterday, and I also vaguely ("vague" is the key word here) thought I saw someone puzzling over my SRS position. Now I understand the confusion. I was incorrect in saying I had gotten out entirely (the trouble with over 200 positions is that it's easy to lose track!) I had two separate SRS positions of about $100k each. I closed one out entirely, and I closed half the other one and made the stop much more liberal. So, yes, I'm still in SRS, but only 1/4th as big as before.

Let's take a look at a chart,shall we?

We have to keep an open mind about a variety of possibilities. Here are my thoughts about each of these:

  • Blue arrow – this, to me, is the most logical next step in the S&P. That is, a move down to about 730, which is both a Fibonacci level as well as the breakout point from the inverted head & shoulders pattern of the /ES. I am positioned for this move.
  • Red arrow – if the blue arrow executes, this could be next, although it is a lot more "iffy." In fact, if it does this, we're all going to go a bit crazy, because it's going to be extremely difficult to tell what's next. I've tinted in the blue "mush zone" since the question on everyone's mind is going to be whether 666 (<—cue spooky music) holds or is broken. The market is going to be completely awash in angst.
  • Magenta arrow – if we do break 666 (again, music please) then we're going to accelerate downward. As I've said, oh, about eight thousand times, I think about 625 or so (plus or minus 25 points) will be the ultimate bottom for this big leg of the bear market. This, for me, would be the best of outcomes, since it would provide a fantastic opportunity to clear out of all this freakin'shorts and puts and load up on the long side.
  • Green arrow – if the market finds some reason (like the Fed's rosy announcement at 2:15 EST today) to keep pushing stocks up, this is a reasonably likely scenario. This will be a bit nerve-wracking, since 800 is such an important level. I would (nervously) be adding shorts if we made a push toward 800.
  • White arrow (in the green "mush zone") – if we do push past 800, which at this stage I find very unlikely, it'll be anyone's guess how far we go. This would wreck so many patterns and wave forms that worldwide madness may ensue on the part of chartists.

So there you have it: a declaration on my part that the market is going to move up or down. And that, my friends, is the kind of bold statement which had made me the the bad boy of charting I am today.