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 High Before The Low

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I have promised my wife that I will fight against my strong natural english tendency to understatement this year, and will at least mention particularly sweet calls that I make when they make target. This is therefore a good time to look back at my first post after Xmas on Monday 28th December where I gave 70% odds that RUT was about to decline 10% into the 1030 area. RUT tagged 1031 yesterday, slightly less than ten trading days after that post, and I’m considering that target made, though I’m not expecting that low to hold long. You can see that post here.

Also worth a mention is my call in the same post that the odds were 50% that SPX would close the year red for the first time ever in a year ending in a 5. Obviously that delivered too, though I’d note that the stat I’d read that SPX had not closed red in a year ending in a 5 since 1875 would have been more impressive if SPX hadn’t been launched 48 years later in 1923. Nonetheless that was still an unbroken string of nine examples that has now been broken. Not the only big stat that was run over last year of course 🙂

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The Gartman Grid

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I see that Dennis is front-and-center on ZeroHedge this morning, so I thought I’d offer up these thoughts: we all have opinions on the stock market. However, very few of us have daughters that are Senior Line Producers (whatever that means) on CNBC, thus we cannot share our musings with the rest of the world.  Happily, there is one Dennis Gartman who is blessed with just such a situation, and he appears on CNBC with more frequency than even the great Janet Yellen (plus he hasn’t fainted on camera yet, not even once).

Mr. Gartman’s pontifications, however, can at times be opaque and thus hard to interpret, so I would like to offer this easy-to-use grid to help you tease out precisely where the man stands. The quadrant is comprised of two simple binary facts:

Horrible Colorful Tie or Open Collar? – Dennis likes to mix up the wardrobe. Sometimes he goes footloose and fancy-free, doffing the tie and leaving the top shirt button joyously undone. At other times, he steps up his game and goes for the All Business look, donning a tie which contains colors rarely found in the natural world. (more…)