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.

Why I Shorted Aeropostale

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Earlier this month, I had a nice profit from Aeropostale. I covered, and it spent the next couple of weeks (circled below) noodling around. I re-shorted it yesterday for a couple of reasons;

(1) It had the makings of a huge, huge head and shoulders pattern;

(2) More importantly – and this is very "un-chartish" of me – it was just about the only maker/seller of clothes that wasn't soaring to the moon. Everything else – be it ANF, LTD, LULU – seemed to just lurch skyward. But Aeropostale must be out of favor amongst consumers, so I figured that anything this weak in the face of super-strong industry brethren must have real troubles.

I have, just as I did earlier this month, covered to take profits. But I daresay this stock could be in the single digits within a year's time.

0520-aro

Big Reversal Likely (by Springheel Jack)

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I've been banging the bull drum hard this week, but looking at the charts this morning it seems that we are likely to see a big reversal today (Editor's note – I agree!). Hopefully this post will be up before my charts are overtaken by events too much. First ES where the main picture is a rising wedge within a larger falling wedge. The smaller rising wedge is breaking down and the next obvious target is the lower falling wedge trendline in the 1313 area:

Looking closer at the chart you can see that the rising wedge has broken down, and has broken down further since:

On the NQ chart there's a nice looking IHS but you can see we never made the downside target on the big broadening ascending wedge. It seems we may be returning to hit it in the 2310-2315 area:

Looking more closely at the short term setup on NQ you can say that the IHS is fully formed and looks pretty good, but the support trendline was breaking at the time I did the chart and has since broken with confidence:

On TF there's a lower quality IHS, and another decent support trendline that has now also broken:

There are a lot of wedges in play today and here is another on the EURUSD 6omin chart. Since I capped this chart this has also broken down with confidence:

Copper is standing out from the crowd this morning. There's a rising wedge there too, but it hasn't broken support yet. If it reaches 405 then that will be the break down:

Silver's a trickier play here, but if we see breaks down everywhere else then I'd expect silver to fall in sympathy. There is a possible triangle forming on the silver chart and support would be in the 33.6 area:

Eight charts this morning which is a lot, but hard to capture the picture with less this morning. This is a very bearish looking setup and we could fall hard today and extend into (the now generally bearish) Monday. I would caution longs to be careful unless main declining resistance on ES can be broken, which looks a long shot in the short term. Opex Friday today so the road could get bumpy. Happy hunting everybody 🙂

So What Does LinkedIn Mean?

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All right, all right. I'll say a few words on LNKD's insane public debut today. This is off the top of my head, and I feel guilty even piling on about this company on which I wish there'd be a moratorium placed with respect to news articles….

In no particular order:

(1) This is bound to heat up interest in the likes of SecondMarket, since – against all probabilities – those who got into the stock before today made out like bandits.

(2) The chatter out there is that every social networking firm would like to go public Approximately By Tomorrow since the appetite for this is clearly so rampant. After all, why wait nearly a year (ahem – Facebook?) when you have no idea what the next year will bring?

(3) If I were Reid Hoffman (and I'm not – – since I'm about one hundred pounds lighter and $1.9 billion dollars poorer) I would have wished for, say, a 5% gentle rise in price today. Unless this stock pushes merrily higher and higher and remains in the triple digits, it won't be long before he has a lot of pissed-off public owners. Let's keep in mind this thing was priced at $45 last night. What if it returned to $45 in three months? That's going to make for a lot of very underwater holders.

(4) I can already tell that people have a serious case of 1999 on the brain all over again, and I'm aghast at how many prominent commentators are saying – without a hint of irony – that It's Different This Time.

(5) Something in the back of my head is telling me the bear market can't seriously get rocking and rolling again until Social Networking Mania is over and done with. Sadly, that won't be the case until Facebook comes public, and present talk is that such an event is nearly a year away. Grumble. Well, we'll just have to take things one day at a time, yes?

0519-reid