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.

The Paused Recession

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Contributed by Stephan Davied

The world seems to be in the throngs of something very strange. Are we in a recession or are we in a depression or are we in a 10 year period of just super low growth? The world has never coined a term to describe years and years of low growth, probably because it does not happen much.

Generally countries, businesses, schools and even humans go through cycles. The human normally sleeps at night and is awake during the day. This cycle is critical to our survival as we need the proper amount of down time to support our up time. Businesses go through cycles. Retailers are super busy during the holiday season and other times they are less busy. This is a retailers yearly cycle. Bigger than that are economic cycles. During times of robust business activity business struggle to keep up with demand so in turn they invest For example in times of robust growth a concrete company who can’t meet the demand of its customers might build another concrete plant.

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Anatomy of a Correction

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I know I am not telling most Slope readers things they don’t already know, but if you don’t mind, here is a little infomercial on how I tracked this market reaction…

Over the last week we (NFTRH) have used market sentiment indicators and index charts to gauge the prospects of finding a high on the post-September relief ‘bounce’ rally.

During August and September market sentiment had become brutally over bearish and this was very dangerous from the bears’ perspective. We set upside bounce targets for the SPX at 2020, 2040, 2060 and 2100. The first three were resistance levels (broken support) and the last was the general measurement of the ‘W’ bottom that formed in August and September. With the extremes in bearish sentiment, it was not so surprising that SPX climbed all the way to just above 2100.

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