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.

Interim Top? (by Springheel Jack)

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I've been waiting for weeks for the upper trendline of the ES rising wedge to be hit, and it was finally hit near the close yesterday:

I'm expecting to make the next interim top here or very close to here now, though there's still some wiggle room. As you can see, the rising wedge target on the SPX chart has not quite been hit yet, though it's very close:

My first target for the correction is the 1255 – 1260 area, for the lower trendline of the ES rising wedge. If broken, then my next target is in the 1200 area, depending on when it is reached. That target is based on the assumption that the rising wedge will turn into a rising channel. That's always the first thing I look for if a rising wedge is broken and it happens a lot, though for some reason I've not found any references to this in Bulkowski or other pattern analyses. It really does happen a lot, I was looking at the KO chart yesterday and there was a very nice example there:

There's every reason to think that at least some retracement is due on the Nasdaq chart as well. I've been watching a megaphone build on there, and I considered posting the chart yesterday but it didn't quite make the cut, not least because the 2340 target looked overambitious. It made it though, and the next downside target is in the 2270-5 area:

It could go the other way of course. There are still big IHS patterns on copper and EURUSD that look worrying but I'm not expecting either to play out. My analyst friend that called the EURUSD low at 1.29 and I both felt that the first wave up was unlikely to get much beyond 1.35 and we touched that level overnight. If EURUSD breaks 1.35 with confidence though, it might run much further and any equities correction would get tougher:

We might well knock around up here for another couple of days and perhaps have a stab at breaking 1300 on SPX, but this is a very likely area for a short term top, and that's what I'm expecting to see here.

Volatility/Risk Revisited

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Phoenix_04 On January 6th, 2011 I posted a blog about volatility in the US equity markets (click to see that blog post).  The short version of that post was that volatility as indicated by the $VIX was cheap on a historical basis.  I suggested that readers get long volatility either through $VIX futures or the VXX ETF.  I know that the VXX is called a "widow-maker" by many and that deserves a separate conversation (I will summarize briefly at the end of this post).

 

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Sky-High Copper

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I don't trade futures, but I thought I'd share a couple of copper charts just to drive home the notion (which apparently no one believes) that this market is overbought. There are two flavors of these charts – one of them adjusted (that is, the price is adjusted for gaps that take place during rollovers), and the other not. Here they are, in that order:

0118hgADJUSTED-

 

0118hgUNADJUSTED-

For whatever reason, copper has a very strong correlation to equity markets, and it's pretty evident that the huge run-up in prices over the past two years in awfully long in the tooth.