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.

Grassy Knoll (by Fayssoux)

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Mention that the Fed may have been engineering equity price outcomes in polite company and you will be scorned as a wacky conspiracy theorist.   Earlier this month, the people at Trim Tabs went public with the observation that they could not see where the money flow was coming from to explain the 2009 rally, and suggested maybe that the "plug" involved the Fed.

The Contrary Investor, a subscription site I gladly pay for year in and year out, put up an intriguing and well argued piece last night that shows how this "plug" might have worked.  In short, the Fed conveniently times its MBS purchases for option expiration week, liquidity provided therein to TBTF banks goes to their prop desks, up go equity markets. Repeat each month.

Stabilize the housing market, get 201(k)s back to 301(k)s, and we will be in the clear.  It certainly seemed to be working.  Oddly, the resentment against GS prop desk profits may in fact reflect deep-seated public resentment against the stock market ramp, which retail investors have not embraced.  Do they know it is "fake?"  

 Fedmbss011710 

A Selfish Experiment

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OK, this is probably not interesting to most of you, but it won't take but a moment.

I use Excel to monitor my positions, and I use TOS as my data feed to keep track of the most recent price. So, in a cell where I want to track, say, the price of GOOG, I would have =TOS|LAST!GOOG

However, there are a handful of symbols which yield barfage. Wells Fargo (WFC) is one of them, for some reason. In such a case, I get:

0122-barf 

I don't mean to make this my personal bug support forum, but (a) does it act this way for those of you using Excel/TOS too (b) any ideas? Thanks.

A Quieter Day

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Good morning, everyone…..

The subject line of this post may surprise you since, after yesterday's 200-point drop on the Dow, it would seem strange to suggest things will be "quiet." What I'm referring to is that the posts today won't be fast and furious like yesterday's ridiculous sixteen-post mayhem.

I'm going to be absent for a portion of the day on some personal business, so my fingers simply won't be near the keyboard to type. If I could leave them here, I would. The point is to not be surprised at (a) the lack of a post every 17 minutes (b) the consequential multi-hundreds of comments that pile up in a given post.

Speaking of the day's activity, I have a spiffy little tracker what shows how many people are on at any given moment throughout the day. There are times when over 700 are crowded on the blog at the same time. It's an interesting chart:

0122-usage

Oh, one final bit of business. The Adjunct Task Force for Avatar Themes met at 4 this morning. Due to the early hour, tempers were short, as was patience, so it was quickly decided that today's avatar theme would be South Park characters. So you know what to do.

Dollar-Gold Analysis (by Mike Paulenoff)

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The dollar (viewed from its cash index, the DXY) continues to climb, and in fact has exceeded its prior high of 78.45 from January 12, which is a very positive near-term technical "event" for the greenback. After all, the idea that the DXY could rally, pull back, and then rally again to a higher-high in the aftermath of a powerful downtrend was unthinkable to most fundamentalists.

Now, however, with the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts, a possible refocus on fiscal priorities by the Democrats, and trouble brewing in Greece, all of sudden, perhaps, there are underlying reasons to move into dollars? Be that as it may, my work argues that the DXY is heading for 80.00, and then 82.00. Meanwhile, gold is acting inversely, as it should. Let's notice that the price structure has sliced just beneath its Aug-Jan support line (today at $1107.25).

Inability of prices to climb and sustain above the trendline as the session wears on, coupled with continued demand for the DXY could press gold prices quickly towards a test of the December low at $1074.00.