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.

When to Short Miners Again?

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The "call" I am probably most proud of – – and the one which has benefitted me the least! – – has been my loud and persistent declaration to short miners. In the face of an army of precious metals kooks and email-sending weirdos convinced that gold was heading to $5,000 per ounce, I stood by my miners bearishness, and it's obviously been screamingly correct.

But with miners on the mend, when do we go in for the kill? After all, my analog holds that the majority of the plunge remains in front of us.

To help answer this question, I present a very simplistic view of the first instance; we have the peak in green, the first drop in blue, and the bounce in magenta. It's the magenta figure we want to know for the present GDX.

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200 DMA Analysis (by Springheel Jack)

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Some of you may have been wondering why I have been so interested in the SPX 200 DMA as we have traded in this area, and also why I have remained interested even after support there has clearly broken. Moving averages aren't trendlines however, and a break of a moving average doesn't perform in the same way as a break of a trendline. I've done a chart looking at the SPX and the 200 DMA over the last four years to illustrate this. 

Since the start of 2009 the 200 DMA on SPX has been hit from above or below fifteen times. Ten of those times were tests, and five were breaks with conviction. Of the five breaks, only the break on the move up from the 2009 low happened without at least one clear test of the 200 DMA before the break, though the test in 2010 was the flash crash of course, which wasn't a normal test. Of the ten tests, six were clear short-term breaks of the trendline, and in those cases the test didn't generally move more than twenty to thirty points below the 200 DMA and the 200 DMA was recovered within a week. On the five breaks with conviction the 200 DMA was not more than tested again before there was a definite change in trend. 

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