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.

The Unending Joys of Blogging

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I got this email earlier today:

Hi Tim. Appreciate your site but feel you could be helping me more with understanding your trading strategy if you would consider the following.

1. For example what do you use to find the many stocks that are in key technical areas of support or resistance in order to enable your new long or short positions. Is this a manual process or automated in finding these charts?;

2. Could you please put in the actual entry point of your trades in addition to your stop loss points;

3. Could up please add in the technical reasoning behind a given entry point. Sometimes it is right on the support or resistance point or other times above or below the same.

I promptly replied with a clear but, I thought, polite enough answer:

I don't have the time for all that; it's a miracle I can even do the blog in the first place.

Then I get this:

Thanks for the quick reply and the "horseshit" excuses. Bottom line, if you are going to do something do it right or not at all so enough with the poor me blog talk and time issues, etc…………. You must be shitting me you cant put in a entry point but you can put in a stop loss point for a new position. What a crock of shit. Tim one thing you are superb at and that is gloating and bullshit. With all the money you have/make. whatever get a helper!!!!! Outta here.

Just so I'm straight on this – – – I do a blog for absolutely free, do about ten posts a day, and someone storms in demanding an exhaustive amount of new information (with me shelling out cash for a "helper", if necessary), and then storming off when I tell him I don't have time. Wow. Good riddance. Sometimes I am simply amazed at people out there. I'm going to be a mensch and keep your email address private.

Has AAPL Jumped the Shark?

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Let me do the same preface I do every time I mention Apple, Inc. – – love the company, love the products, practically worship Steve Jobs (who lives about a mile from me), etc., etc. So: YAY.

Having said that, over the course of its third-of-a-century in existence, Apple tends to move in very broad ups and downs. An uber-low point, for instance, was in 1985, when Sculley kicked Jobs out of the firm. Another low point was in 1997, when Michael Dell infamously said of Apple that they should just close the place up and give the money that was left over back to shareholders (at the time, AAPL was at about $7 per share – – nice advice, there, Mikey).

The national fever that took hold over the unfortunately-named iPad was almost comic. I was interested yesterday to watch Jobs' presentation, because – – well – – something was missing. He kept going on and on with his usual superlatives and hyperbole, but something told me the audience wasn't quite buying it. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

It's also interesting to see what AAPL's stock price has done recently, what with the blow-out earnings that exceeded the wildest hopes, and the introduction of a widely anticipated new product. Simply stated, AAPL's price action has been sucktastic. And I think that AAPL is, for a while at least, past its prime.

0128-aapl

Hot Stock TYP

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At about 10:30 EST, a cloture vote is going to be held on the Bernanke post; that's bound to cause some fireworks soon. As a side note, I was surprised to see how strong the /ES was last during the State of Confusion speech last night. The entire Obama lift has evaporated, though, and as I'm typing this, the /ES is in the red.

I'm especially surprised at the strength of one of my longs, symbol TYP, which is the triple–bearish (!) technology ETF. Judging from the volume, it looks like this issue is getting some interest.

0128-typ

2009 ES Gap Fill Summary Part Deux (by TradeFlightPlan)

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Our prior post on the 2009 ES Gap Fill Summary
received a nice response with several followup questions and thirst for
more. The most frequent questions in our inbox asked what effect the
size of the opening gap had on the gap fill probabilities.

Well, let's take a look. In this analysis, we determine the size of
the opening gap as the difference between the opening price at 9:30AM
ET and the prior day's 4:00PM ET close for each day in 2009.

It is important to note that we observe astute traders initiate gap fill trades during the Globex session before
the regular market open at 9:30AM. The hour before market open provides
some of the best entry opportunities. However, for a quick study and
gap size distribution, we went ahead and used the 9:30AM opening price
for this analysis.

Many traders use a gap of less than 80-100 points on the Dow futures
(YM) as a signal that the ES is likely to fill its gap. We ran the
analysis for both ES gap fills and half gap fills. As you can see from
the tables and charts, our analysis suggests an ES gap of less than 5-6
points seems to yield the best results.

The opening gap is expressed in ES points, rounded up or down to
contain the actual size of the gap. For example, an actual ES gap of
-3.25 would fall within -4 ES points, an actual ES gap of +3.25 would fall within +4 ES points.

These tables summarize the 2009 ES gap fill statistics based on the
absolute value of the opening gap, regardless of whether it was a
positive or negative value. Click on each table or chart to view in
full size.

ES_GF_Table

ES_HGF_Table

Just to make sure the results didn't wildly differ, we also took a
quick look at the 2009 statistical distribution across all opening gap
values, from negative to positive.

ES_GF_Chart

ES_HGF_Chart