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.

Matryoshka Dolls

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I was concerned yesterday morning that the often very bullish first trading day of the month and the FOMC meeting might push SPX over resistance and seriously damage the spring high setup here, but it seems my concerns were unfounded. Yesterday’s decline was at the least a promising start to the significant retracement that may well be starting here.

I’ve taken the post title today from the russian nested dolls that I enjoyed playing with as a child, and which are very collectible nowadays. They came to mind as I was looking at the SPX 15min chart, where there is a series of nested double-tops in play here to take SPX back to my ideal target at the 200 DMA. The first of those broke down yesterday with a target in the 1574 area. If we get there that will trigger a second double-top targeting the 1557.5 area. If SPX gets to 1557.5 then main support below will be at the possible main double-top valley low at 1536.03, and if we see a break with confidence below there the target would be the 1475 area. The SPX 200 DMA closed at 1461 yesterday and as it is rising, that might well be in the 1475 area by the time it was reached. That is the ideal retracement scenario here and that test of the SPX 200 DMA would most likely be a good opportunity to go long for the rest of the year, though we would see how the retracement develops on the way there of course. Here’s the setup on the SPX 15min chart: (more…)

One Chart and One Thought

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Well, the whole FOMC thing turned out to be pretty anti-climatic. There’s still an hour left in the trading day as I’m typing this, so who knows how we’ll end up, but so far, the tug-of-war seems pretty even between bulls and bears.

For myself, I covered my GLD short early today, but I left most other shorts intact. I am 75% committed; I intended to get aggressive if things really started breaking down, but they haven’t, so I’m standing still for now.  (more…)

A Killer Smile

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Until the FOMC announcement, it’s a bit of a waiting game, so allow me to introduce you to something that has nothing to do with charts or trading: The Dating Game.

The man in question is Rodney Alcala, who has been in prison for decades for the murder of an unknown number of people (some say as many as 130). Even though he was already a convicted felon (and, unknown at the time, had killed four women) he, incredibly, was included as a participant on The Dating Game. I’ll let Wikipedia tell you the story:

In 1978, despite his status as a convicted rapist and registered sex offender, Alcala was accepted as a contestant on The Dating Game. By then he had already killed at least two women in California and two others in New York.Host Jim Lange introduced him as a “successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of 13, fully developed. Between takes you might find him skydiving or motorcycling”.

Actor Jed Mills, who competed against Alcala as “Bachelor #2”, later described him as a “very strange guy” with “bizarre opinions”. He added that Alcala did not wear earrings on the show, as he claimed during his 2010 trial; earrings were not yet a socially acceptable accouterment for men in 1978. “I had never seen a man with an earring in his ear”, he said. “I would have noticed them on him”. The third contestant, Armand Chiami, has not made any public comments.

Alcala won a date with “bachelorette” Cheryl Bradshaw, who subsequently refused to go out with him, according to published reports, because she found him “creepy”. Criminal profiler Pat Brown, noting that Alcala killed Robin Samsoe and at least two other women after his Dating Game appearance, speculated that Bradshaw’s rejection might have been an exacerbating factor. “One wonders what that did in his mind”, Brown said. “That is something he would not take too well. [Serial killers] don’t understand the rejection. They think that something is wrong with that girl: ‘She played me. She played hard to get.’

So three cheers for women’s intuition; the woman who thought he was creepy almost certainly saved her life by not going out with him. Check out the brief video, though. It’s unnerving watching the behavior of a man we now know was a serial murderer.

A Hypothetical Canary Portfolio

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Just for fun, I thought I’d look at a few instruments to see their comparative growth during a one-year period as a broad measure of where “value” vs. “growth” sentiment currently is in a so-called “balanced portfolio.” There are 10 in total, since that’s the number I’m limited to showing on one graph.

Then, if one were so inclined, one could track the performance of this group for the rest of 2013 year to get an idea of general market trend, risk appetite, and the momentum of both. (more…)