Oh-so-ironically, today is the day a big interview came out with me at The Kirk Report.
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.
BPO Says It All
This is the kind of market we're dealing with again. People never tire of bubbles. I'll try to think of something useful to say later. I'm too flustered right now.
Morning Post
I don't think a single week has gone by in the past five months that I haven't received a compelling graph – – usually many of them – – from readers showing me in compelling and convincing terms why This Was The Top. And you know what? Every one of them has turned out to be false.
I've received clever animations of balls tumbling off a charted precipice, and all kinds of Elliott Wave counts – – – and of course newsletters which make squishy dual predictions ("…the market will be up because of such and so or the market will be down because of such and so") and, the next day, declare victory ("...as we wrote yesterday………….the market will be up..…….."). It's tiresome, to put it kindly.
Stocks are moving up, and relentlessly so. It started March 6, and it hasn't really paused since. My prediction of 1050 (which I did a yeoman's job ignoring) is within spitting distance, and my uppermost projection for the S&P of 1200 seems completely plausible now.
So I'm feeling really worn out. And I think I'm going to stick to long suggestions since that seems to be the only direction stocks are going.
Bear Trap
It's getting to the point where I'm just going to let Royal do all my posts; he's giving me all this great material. Here's what the past five months have felt like:
The Risk to Da Bears
This whole "buy the dips" nonsense is in its fifth month of working well for the bulls. Painful, ain't it? It seems that on the rare instances the bears get a respite – – like just a few days ago, on Monday – – it's a "one-hit wonder".
The real risk, I think, is if the market can click above the highs seen earlier this month. We are not far away from them at all, and some of the major patterns that have formed are pretty bullish. Let's take SSO, the ultralong ETF, as an example:
If we break above 31.94, the recent high, that's going to be quite bullish for the market in general. And let's take a look at the even more potent FAS, whose recent high is also marked:
One doesn't have to squint real hard to see that these are good, solid bullish patterns. I have held my nose and start acquiring "lottery longs" again, to try to ameliorate the mountain of shorts that I have.
So, for me, Monday was awesome, and Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday have been rather un-awesome. I know we're in OPEX week, but I don't think the trading world is turned on its head every few weeks. In other words, "that's no excuse."
The funny thing (well, not ha-ha funny, but ouch-funny) is that I used to hold up mid-March to mid-May 2008 as the oh-so-awful, gosh-I-hope-I-never-endure-such-a-thing-again time period. But these five five months make that prior timespan look like remedial kindergarten. The past five months easily "out-brutal" last Spring, so shame on me for even mentioning it, since the trading gods thought they'd have some fun.
Anyway, I think I'm done for the day. I'm a lot less chatty, as you've noticed, on up days versus down days. It's the nature of Slope. Good night!
