I'm hard at work on some new posts and – of course – SocialTrade. In the meanwhile, this song was on my mind this morning. If you grew up in the 80s, it's a must-listen. Enjoy!
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.
Polaris Wedge
Eeek! I had taken the snapshots below of Polaris Industries yesterday, and I intended to do a post about the stock as a short idea, but I got too distracted with SocialTrade improvements. (And they're still tumbling in this morning – – I'll do a post later).
The "eeek!" is because the stock is down almost 5% right now. All the same, it's still a very interesting break of the wedge.
Here's a closer view. Again, this doesn't include today's action.
Opposing H&S Patterns (by Springheel Jack)
I laid out a number of options yesterday morning for likely direction. Bullish and bearish options #1 were straight breaks of the 1335 SPX resistance or 1290 SPX support levels respectively, but I mentioned that I thought these were less likely than the alternatives.
Bullish and bearish options #2 involved forming the right shoulder on a bearish H&S indicating to 1275 SPX, or forming the right shoulder on a bullish IHS indicating to 1405. The action yesterday was consistent with both of these H&S patterns and I'll run through how each option looks today.
Bullish option #1 is the straight break up through 1335 SPX area resistance. I still think this is a less likely option but in support of this option we have the SPY daily bollinger band chart, where you can see that the middle bollinger band, now at 131.58, has now acted as support for each of the last four trading days, with either the open or close very close to it each day. 1290 SPX is main support here in my view, but to test it we will have to see a conviction break below the middle band, currently in the 1311 area:
Playing It Safe(r)
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!
SocialTrade Gets More Social
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.
There's another time-saver we just added as well…..when you mouse over a thumbnail, not only does it 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!
