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.

Head-Butt

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Well, we got another end-of-day push, and my big, fat intraday paper profits disappeared Houdini-style. Meh. That's the way it goes.

Looking at the /ES daily graph, my view is that today served the purpose of retracing back to the broken channel. Now, in recent weeks, two black candles have been all that's been required for the market to blast higher. That could happen tomorrow.

But if it doesn't happen tomorrow, and we wind up down, that's bearish for two reasons: (1) it violates recent bullish behavior, which has been very consistent for over a month (2) it affirms the importance of the broken channel.

That's it for me. Good night!

Official Payments

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A random thought popped into my head as my mind was wandering during a school meeting. It has to do with the organization Official Payments Corp., which lets people pay their taxes with their credit card. So let me get this straight:

  1. A person who cannot afford their taxes………
  2. Can borrow money they don't have at interest rates they can't afford……….
  3. To give money to a government that is by any measure insolvent…………
  4. To pay for the printing presses to manufacture money……….
  5. To send as multi-million dollar bonuses……….
  6. To individuals who don't need the money…………
  7. Who also enjoy a special 15% tax rate that the person from step (1) does not get to use.

Do I have that right? OK, good. Just want to make sure.

Quote of the Day

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From Big Picture's Peter Boockvar:

Short sellers (SS) didn't get people to buy homes with no money down, SS didn't convince people to buy homes with teaser rates, SS didn't convince people to lie about their income on their mortgage applications, SS didn't tell banks/brokers to lever up to such huge levels, SS didn't tell Greenspan to cut rates to 1% and leave it there, SS didn't invent FNM and FRE, SS didn't tell the OTS, OCC, FDIC, Fed, SEC, FFIEC, FTC, FHFA and all the state regulators to twiddle their thumbs all day, SS didn't tell the rating agencies to rate AAA on anything that moved, SS didn't tell banks to lend to commercial real estate investors on a property where the rent didn't cover the mortgage payment, SS didn't tell the average consumer to spend more money than they make and borrow difference.

Short selling is a legitimate form of speculation that fully enhances market liquidity and price discovery.