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.

Playing It Safe(r)

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Between Sunday afternoon and Tuesday afternoon, I imagine most traders – bull and bear alike – had pretty much pulled most of their hair out. Huge up. Huge down. Huge up. The entirety of the Spanish drama has come and gone, and prices are pretty much where they all were at Friday's close. It's as if nothing happened (but a lot did happen in between).

For my own portfolio, it stands as follows:

+ About 52% committed to positions, the rest in cash;
+ 59 individual shorts, all of them small;
+ 5 longs, all of them ETFs, and all of them medium-sized;
+ A split of 70% short/30% long 

As we are about 80% of the way through Q2, I am getting cautious about preserving profits. April was profitable for me. So was May. So is June, thus far. I don't want anything to change that!

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SocialTrade Gets More Social

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The new SocialTrade web site is getting better literally every day.

The latest couple of features are pretty cool. The first one reveals to you, in the upper-left corner of each thumbnail, how many comments (represent by the little talk bubble icon) and Likes (represent by the plus sign) a given page has received. For example, in the image below, the VIX chart received one comment and five Likes.

This will help you see at a glance which pages are garnering the most discussion and approval among SocialTraders.

0612-STcomLike

There's another time-saver we just added as well…..when you mouse over a thumbnail, not only does it 0612-STdescription expand the image so you can see it more clearly, but it will display the description (if any was entered) for the page. This  will make understanding what's "beneath" the thumbnail much easier. (It also makes it more important than ever that you provide a description when stacking something, in case the value of the page isn't immediately obvious).

If you haven't signed up for free SocialTrade access, please do so. You'll love it!

Finely Balanced (by Springheel Jack)

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That was an ugly bearish engulfing daily candlestick on SPX yesterday, and everyone seems to be bearish today. They may be right, but we aren't out of bullish options yet until we see a conviction break below the 1290 area. At the moment I am seeing this as finely balanced with good technical arguments for a move in either direction. I'll lay out what I see as the highest probability paths in each direction.

I'm showing the bearish engulfing candlestick on SPY below, as for some reason the SPX datafeed is innacurate, and therefore candles and gaps are much less accurate on SPX. I've corresponded with stockcharts about this before and they tell me it is a problem with the main datafeed from S&P and there's nothing they can do. The middle bollinger band held on the close, more or less, and we might bounce directly from here. This is the first bull option and my least favored option as it just seems a long shot on the overall setup:


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