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.

Trading Ranges

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From a day trading perspective it is important to recognize the larger trading ranges. In my opinion, day traders profit from how a market moves, not where it ultimately moves to.

Price action chart:

ranges

Volume profile macro composite chart:

composite

In the following chart the low volume nodes will be marked off with GREEN lines and high volume nodes with RED lines.

Hybrid chart:

hybrid

Looks pretty good so far. If you really want to stack the odds in your favor add weekly pivots and unfilled gaps into your charts. This allows for easy identification of the larger trading ranges and gives context to the smaller ranges and templates I use going into each day. For more information on how I define those smaller templates.. look at my previous header posts.

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest path to victory. Tactics without strategy is the longest path to defeat. Absent strategy and tactics, defeat is assured.” – Sun Tzu

Psychology Matrix

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To adapt a quote from the great Yogi Berra,  “trading is 90% mental, the other 50% is physical.”  Huh?  Simply, mastering the psychological aspects of trading is vastly more important than the physical act of charting and executing trades.  The most difficult part of dealing with the markets on a daily basis is controlling the mind as opposed to controlling trades (which we have no influence over).  Therefore, I’d like to explore the four quadrants that make up a trader’s psychology. (more…)

Don’t Fear the Reaper

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Yesterday I shorted PAY, and I lucked in to a great profit today. I had no idea earnings were coming out (I’m a chartist, after all; I don’t track such things). I looked at the chart and thought, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”, and after the huge gap-downs, I figured the recovery PAY had seen would soon be reversed. Little did I know it would come so swiftly. (more…)

Understanding Binary Options Trading

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binar optionA lot of people are trading binary options these days. It is a very popular financial instrument and its popularity is rising among personal and institutional investors. Since 2008 binary options, that are often considered exotic instruments, are available for trade with numerous binary options brokers who offer them on specialized online trading platforms. These websites actually allow investors to deal with financial instruments that are simplified if compared to the binary options traded on the stock exchanges. (more…)