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.

December Payrolls: ‘Back End’ Still Strong, Let’s Look Closer

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It is important to distinguish the ‘back end’ from the ‘front end’ of the economy or else all you end up with hype emanating from the financial sphere every time an economic data release comes out. For example, I was critical of Martin Armstrong’s post, Is the recession Starting? in a rebuttal post, Armstrong 3+ Decades Late on Manufacturing because Marty’s post not only brought back some jaw droppingly old fashioned concepts about US manufacturing (JiT and automation replacing labor) but it focused only on the ‘front end’ of the economy, affirming the “ECM” in a short info-blurb.

While we caught the downturn in manufacturing ahead of time (July) and also have been on the sharp deceleration in Semiconductor bookings and billings (a two month trend now), these Canaries in the Economic Coal Mine are just front end clues. Meanwhile, as we have been noting for months in NFTRH, the back end, with a strong US dollar at its back, has been doing just fine.

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In With The New

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I’m reorganizing my mornings at the moment to accommodate my increased morning chartload with the futures charts I am doing for theartofchart.net subscribers. There are a lot more charts for me to do now in the mornings, and a subscriber twitter feed to manage intraday, but I should soon be at the stage where I can get the ES, NQ, TF, DX, CL, GC and ZB futures charts posted for subscribers in the hours leading up to a deadline 30 minutes before the open, and then follow up with my free post here ideally before the RTH open, or within the hour afterwards if that’s not possible. I’m still working on that but expecting to have shaken down my new morning routine within a couple of weeks. Working on it.

Stan and I are also shaking down the new private twitter feed, mainly intraday ES at the moment but I’m looking at adding intraday signals on CL soon & possibly more later. Yesterday was a very nice day on the feed, with Stan using a short trade 1967 into 1930 in the afternoon as a training exercise, and for those who stayed after the close we did the same on another trade from 1933 up to 1960 from there, though irritatingly ES stalled three ticks short of my ideal 1961 double bottom target at that high. There are no trade recommends on any of our services but we share our signals, setups and are doing a lot of training on how to trade while minimizing risk.

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