NOTE! Disqus seems down (surprise!) which is a shame, considering the market action. Anyway, it's not you.
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.
Oh, It’s All Just So, So Sad…….
The landscape of bear blogs and their brethren in the blogosphere is in a sorry state. Gaze out upon the smoldering ash heaps and witness:
xTrends – once the most popular destination for bearish traders and recipient of thousands of comments per post – – now a virtual ghost town, with perhaps a few posts a month (only one of which is from the chief there) and a smattering of grateful fare-thee-wells in the comments section;
Market Ticker – our beloved Karl, the Don Quixote of the blogosphere, tilting against the insanity that surrounds us but few can see; Karl seems like a mensch, but one wonders when the black helicopters are going to make their landing in Niceville, Florida to take him away for re-education at the Bernanke Center.
noXtrends – shuttered, due to the departure of its most frequent commenter and the fact that their principal target (that would be xTrends) doesn't really offer anything at which one can take pot-shots anymore
Slope of Hope – populated largely with True Believers, but increasingly the home of agonizingly smug bulls who are there to cluck their tongues and pat the poor, misguided heads of the few bears that have survived the past year.
One recalls the suicide note of Abbie Hoffman – "It's too late. We can't win. They've gotten too powerful." Virtually everyone believes this of the satanic Blankfein/Geithner/Bernanke triumvirate. We'll see. Until then, Slope is here to stay, smoldering ashes be damned.
Comcastic
Another day, another record high across all indexes. Lovely.
One long position I own and actually like is Comcast, shown below.
The Verticals
I will go to my grave unable – or at least unwilling – to trade momentum stocks. These are the hyperbolic stocks that look like hockey sticks, going up vertically until………they stop. Knowing when they're going to stop is a guess I don't want to take, particularly after they've gone up hundreds of percent. It's just not my style of charting or trading.
For what it's worth (which is probably $0), here are a couple of stocks I track for no particular reason – God knows I'm not going to buy them (or, even worse, short them).
Weakness in the ES? (by Greg)
Let's start with a few ES charts:
The above chart is a little busy, but it shows we've reached a low volume by price area, which often means price would hang out for some time to fill the void with more price discovery. Also note the massive volume in the area of 1200 on the ES. My take is we get there, we'll see plenty of sellers show up.
Let's zoom into the hourly:
Looks to me like we got a tad bit of rejection in the 1170 region. Could be those from the 1200 area just itching to sell. Note also how we tagged the channel line, and then fell to the next lower one, broke through and back tested and got rejected? A touch of selling maybe?
Now let's zoom in once more:
Don't know about you, but it's looking like the recent parabolic move on the ES might just finally be a little long in the tooth.
The other thought I wanted to share was about listening to the market. When we trade, we all have TA of some sort that catches our interest be it setups, indicator's patterns are what have you. The one thing I think we sometimes miss in our rush to trigger a trade, is hearing (although with our eyes) what the market is telling us. No matter what system you chose to trade by, it all boils down to filtering when to take the trade, and when not to.
For some it's a purely a mechanical process, for others something completely different. My suggestion is watch closely how price and volume are playing out at any given moment when you near a point you might trigger a trade and see if you have a sense of it, and what it's telling you. If focus your attention on hearing it's message, and are successfully you'll often have both better confidence and success in your trades.
