Originally published on TheTechTrader.com.
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.
Old Faithful
In spite of the bizarre-o, always-go-up market we're in, there is one financial instrument that remains staunch to me: GDX. The miners ETF seems to be increasingly marching to the beat of its own drummer. Even on a day like this, where equities are zooming to nosebleed levels, the miners are down (again) more than 1%. The chart below contrasting the SPY (black) with GDX (blue) sums this up neatly.
VIX Being Beaten into Serenity
Ben Bernanke: ‘How You Like Me Now, Suckas?’
A newsletter that was actually pretty workmanlike, charting what it needed to chart and setting its market parameters as usual, ended a little weirdly as the writer had obviously not yet fully processed and resolved his feelings about the Fed Chairman and his brilliantly conceived operation whereby the Fed feeds favored economic areas (hello housing index) through long term bond purchases and sops up the money supply by selling short term bonds. The result is a painting, a representation of reality as dreamed up by an academic genius. This was the 'wrap up' segment to NFTRH196:
Bernanke: How You Like Me Now, Suckas?
Gold is twisting around and being restrained by policy. This policy makes it appear that the system is just fine. But this is just a painting, a fraud. A powerful entity is selling non-strategic T bonds to buy up strategic ones. It is painting the macro economic picture in a brilliantly despicable operation to keep previously popped bubbles like housing and current bubbles like government credit alive with no need as yet for outright printing. Markets, including the gold market, seem to buy it.
Back to the “Mean”
Where is Oil headed? A clue may lie in the AUD/USD forex pair Weekly chart.
As you can see from the three Weekly charts below of the Commodities ETF (DBC), AUD/USD, and Oil, the Aussie $ closed above 1.03 on Tuesday, and price now sits just above a confluence of its mid-Bollinger Band ("mean"), the 50 sma (red), and a price apex level of 1.0274 (which also happens to sit near the left shoulder of a potential large and unwieldy Head & Shoulders formation). It's important that this confluence level hold as support in order that the Aussie $ may continue upward to, potentially, its upper Bollinger Band or higher.
Price on Oil sits just below a Fibonacci confluence level of 90.18 and just above the bottom of a large uptrending channel. Should the Aussie $ continue to rally, we may see Oil reach its "mean" at 94.89 (which is also a confluence of the 50% Fibonacci retracement level, the mid-Bollinger Band, and the 50 sma) or continue higher to, potentially, its upper Bollinger Band.
Furthermore, it wouldn't hurt to see DBC hold above its mid-Bollinger "mean" and continue its trek up to its confluence level of 27.47 or higher in support of these moves.
A failure to move higher on one of these three could well negatively influence the others…worth watching all of them to see if any weakness develops.
