In an attempt at reversal psychology against the universe (as opposed to, say, the Let Em Burn video), I am whole-heartedly supporting AJC's target of 1500 (or more! much more!) on the S&P this year. In fact, I hope the bulls have a terrific 2011. Go get 'em, Abby!
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.
Everything is Just Super!
Fashion Finally Pays
Over the past months, few sectors have fooled me as badly as speciality retailers. I have tried shorting them – – TIF, WSM, JNY, LIZ – – you name it – – over and over, and each time they seemed to puke to new highs.
It seems perhaps the trend has, at last, changed. My retail plays are starting to work out, and today's plunge in LIZ seems to be encouraging other specialty retailers to join "suit". Heh.
Anyway, here's another favorite:
Silver Breaks Down (by Springheel Jack)
ES is still within the rising channel of the last five weeks. Support today is at 1260 and resistance is at 1281:
So far, so boring, but elsewhere things are starting to get very interesting. I've been watching to see whether silver would break the support trendline from 18, and after a couple of days of testing it hard it has now broken through. For my money silver has made a major interim top and a serious correction has now begun. I've tried to show this in the context of the longer term chart and we might in theory see a correction down to 12 now. That seems (cough) extremely unlikely and I'm looking for a correction into the 20 – 22 area:
EURUSD made a marginal new low overnight and is clearly now in a new wave down. We'll see how far that goes. There are a lot of analysts expecting to find major support in the 1.27 – 1.29 area, and that could be right if we've just been watching an ABC correction from the November high. We'll see, and I'll be watching other USD currency pairs with clearer pattern setups for directional clues as EURUSD is currently a mess, though the current wave down may form a helpful pattern as it progresses.
One of those to watch is definitely GBPUSD, where there is a clear falling wedge within a very possible rising channel. I'm expecting a move down below 1.53 to hit the falling wedge support trendline and the notional rising channel lower trendline and at that point we'll see which way GBPUSD breaks. Falling wedges are obviously bullish patterns, but they break downwards about 30% of the time:
AUDUSD is another to watch, and that is currently correcting towards trendline support in the 98.5 area. If that support breaks then I'd expect a much deeper correction with a target in the 90 area:
Oil's looking interesting at the moment, and appears to be correcting towards channel support within a falling wedge. That looks decently tradeable and it will be interesting to see whether that wedge too breaks up or down:
One question that is asked a lot is whether what we have seen since March 2009 is a real bull market. I'm going to work up a post on this subject this weekend or next weekend, but for my money the answer can only be no. The reason for that is that no real bull market requires huge amounts of ongoing government intervention to support it. There may be a genuine bull market under here somewhere, but until government intervention finishes there's really no way of knowing, and QE2 may of course be followed by QE3. That raises a number of related issues and I'll try to address some of those in that post.
The Trillion-Dollar Beard
Let me begin, for those of you not fully acquainted with my background, that I'm an Apple guy. I worked at Apple for years in the late 1980s. Steve Jobs has been my personal hero since 1982, before 99.9% of you even knew his name. I bought my first of many Macintoshes in 1984, the year it was introduced. I bought my first of many iPhones on the day it came out in 2007. Same with the iPad. So I can out-Apple the best of them.
However…………..
There has been a lot of talk lately about how Apple is going to become the first trillion-dollar company in the world and/or its stock is going to go to $1,000 share (triple its current value). Eye-catching headlines, yes, and I suppose anything's possible, but it smells to me like wild-eyed bubble-talk, similar to Facebook's $50,000,000,000 valuation.
It all comes down to this: at the risk of being morbid, Steve Jobs isn't immortal. Not only that, but in spite of his healthy lifestyle, he's not going to make anyone's People Who Will Probably Live Longest list. He's been through a lot.
When the day comes………and it will come………that he either falls ill or leaves of his own accord, it will crash the market. Maybe for just one day, but believe me, people will be talking about the "Jobs Crash", and it will have nothing to do with unemployment.
People have made a fortune off Apple stock over the past decade, and God bless 'em. Apple is a great company with great products, great profits, and a great leader. But nothing lasts forever.
