Slope of Hope Blog Posts

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Coming Up Roses

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The market remains firmly in the hooves of the bulls. The Fed's commitment to gobble up $1.25 trillion (that's $1,250,000,000,000) in securities that no one else really wants only got people more excited, and we wound up just a little bit below a new closing high for the year. The /ES is clinging like mad to its fan line.

0812-es

As any experienced technician can tell you, the trend – after careful and exhaustive consideration -is up. Monday and Tuesday were just a drop or two of honey on the tongues of the bears. But, as with everything else since March 6th, it was nothing more than a tease.

Now, I sorta-kinda expected this kind of thing (which is why I "lightened up" on my big positions, as mentioned last night). The two somewhat encouraging things I saw today were (1) in spite of being almostly entirely bearishly positioned, my portfolio overall only fell a little bit today, in spite of a triple-digit rise on the Dow (2) an exhaustive search of nearly 400 stocks in my "Wrecks" portfolio yielded very few lottery plays. Until now, it hasn't been hard finding stocks that have a lot of upside left in them. As it is now, the pickings are getting really slim.

For the past seven sessions, the S&P has been banging its head on the dynamic duo – the trendline and retracement line. If it can break above this, it'll probably move upward with gusto. Given the touch of weakness Monday and Tuesday, I thought we had a chance to actually get some distance from these resistance levels, but it was not to be.

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It seems to me the "easy money" of mid-March to early-August has been made. Bulls and bears alike would both benefit from an easing away from current lofty levels.

0812-compq

But I'll repeat what's being said in many places: until such time as the US dollar gets some good feet under itself, the equity markets are going to stay high. We need to see the EUR/USD start to retreat, then we will get a tumble in equities.