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.

Waiting for Goldot Again

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In August of 2005 I wrote an article entitled Waiting for Goldot. It seems silly now but the mood of the time was one of frustration for many gold bugs as the S&P 500 was on a robo grind upward and gold was seemingly going nowhere. The theme of the article was to have patience, gold was just fine. Of course, that period was in the midst of a more traditional inflation, when gold and commodities out performed stocks. So any measure of patience then was a tiny thing compared to what is needed today.

The bear market in which gold resides today is a complex thing, with global inflation and deflation interacting and producing among other things, a Goldilocks environment in the US and rock solid confidence in the Bernanke and later Yellen Feds. Greenspan was continually derided as he allowed a dangerous commercial credit bubble to expand right along with stock prices and the economy.

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A Litany of Errors

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I suspect some of you saw the article over on ZH about the “trader” who had the misfortune of having his entire account short KBIO which ripped about 700% higher this morning. The guy blew out his entire account (and a lot more) and put up this page to ask for people to help him make his six-figure margin call (the margin call itself is three times bigger than the original account). As of this writing, he’s raised about 1.8% of what he owes Etrade.

Having read the text of his GoFundMe page (which is typically used for more worthy causes, such as helping out families or individuals with medical emergencies or charitable organizations that need assistance), I wanted to review the entirety of his missive, since I think there are some important lessons in here. I’ve cleaned up some of the more egregious misspellings and syntactical errors, since it bothers me to sully my blog with such things. Here we go:

Hello to all you traders out there. I’m starting this page out of the recommendation of other traders in the community.

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Positive Definition

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I was talking a few days ago about this retracement on SPX being a definitional move that would define which scenario SPX would be running into the end of the year. In order to stay on the bear scenario bears needed to avoid a break back over the daily middle band yesterday, and when that inflection point was reached yesterday afternoon the bulls broke back over that with confidence.

Does that entirely kill the bear case here? No, but it makes the bull scenario much more likely unless the bears can reverse this hard, and I can’t see any obvious reason to think that’s likely.

The bull scenario here is that last week’s retracement retested broken double bottom resistance at 2020, and is returning to make the lower double bottom alternate target at a retest of the all time high at 2134. On a break above the higher alternate target is at 2174. SPX daily chart:

151118 SPX Daily

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