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.

WAGnostic Update

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So I took a look at Tim’s 1937 WAG corollary in my DIY
charting program (i.e. Excel).  Peak-to-peak,
mapping every active trading day 1:1, the two datasets are 86.4% correlated
through yesterday:

 
WAG_1
So while correlated is nice, it’s not like people are using
this to predict future behavior or anything. 
However, even an untrained eye can see some amount of “shadowing,” where
the patterns appear very similar- but on different time scales.

So I started playing with the time scales and came across
two WAG scenarios:

1)     
Peak-valley mapping on both: Puts us on the RS and
about to downhill the K-12 like Lane Meyer. 
Today certainly appears to be supporting this run (at least while I was
writing this… the PPT Bat-Phone might not have been called yet).

 
WAG_2
2)     
Peak2-to-peak2 mapped: is interesting in that we’re
not yet to the H&S neckline (more like “on” the neck with a shoulder to go)

 
WAG_3
If anyone can think of a more scientific approach to
evaluating this time-compression hypothesis, I’d be interested to hear it.

One More Heave Needed! (by Springheel Jack)

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I was looking at the excellent chart Joe8888 posted on the SPX rising wedge, and looking at the SPX chart, the rising wedge there is not yet broken, though it is broken already on ES:

100806_SPX_Daily_Rising_Wedge_and_IHS

For a solid technical wedge break we need to close below 1105 SPX IMO, and then the downside opens up considerably.

If we fall to the possible rising channel lower trendline then we could fall to either the 1075 SPX area over a week or so, or the 1085 SPX area over two weeks.

Terry Laundry and Pug (on an alternate scenario) are both suggesting 1055 to 1069 SPX as likely targets, and if we're putting in the RS on a big IHS, as I was suggesting a couple of weeks ago we might do if we bounced off the June high, then shoulders on H&S patterns are supposed to be of roughly equivalent heights, so my targets might well then be too conservative.

Meantime though, everybody push, as we need a good close today for confirmation.

Unemployment Rate of 42%

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I've frequently found the so-called unemployment rate (ostensibly at 9.5%) to be irksome, since it leaves out tens of millions of people (for instance, those who have given up looking for jobs at all). I found this graph from the marvelous Zero Hedge site to be eye-opening.

0806-working

It shows the percentage of our population working is only about 58%. That, to me, is a far more meaningful figure. Now I realize that including schoolchildren and infants as part of the population might seem silly, but at least we're dealing with a metric that isn't subject to the whims of politically-driven government statisticians.

One might suppose that being back at the levels of the 50s, 60s, and 70s wasn't so bad – – well, I imagine that the reason for the surge in the 80s and 90s is because so many more women (who are also part of the population!) were working too.

The bottom line is that, for the whole of this millennium, the percentage of US citizens at work has been dropping very, very sharply.