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.

So What Am I Doing?

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Given the market mayhem, I thought some folks might be interested to hear what I’ve been doing this morning. Before I begin, I’ll mention that at least one person misunderstand from my last post that I “only” had 28 positions. In fact, I had 106 positions (all short, naturally). I was merely showing those with the largest pre-market drops. Anyway…………..

  • I have trimmed from 106 shorts to 75;
  • The 75 I kept have relatively loose stops, to take into account the prospect of central bankers getting cute;
  • I got out of all my ETFs, largely out of caution because of the aforementioned pud-yankers central bankers;
  • I have dropped my exposure from about 150% to about 90%;
  • The charts are still dynamite in their formation, and I think bulls are going to be drinking large mugs of disappointment brew all year long, which should give them a small taste of what it was like being a bear from 2009 to 2014;
  • I firmly believe that all rallies in 2016 should be sold, until such time as we reach 1577 on the S&P 500 cash index.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

My Enthusiasm Was Warranted

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Surely even God cannot be this munificent.

For days now, the market simply plunges a few hundred points, offering up a gift to the formerly-beleaguered bears. The BTFD crowd has been humiliated and battered and are now reeling from confusion.

Yesterday afternoon, after a fantastically profitable day, I told myself to brace for the prospect of market strength, since there will be a natural to-and-fro to the market, and sure enough, the ES was up about 5 points or so, But then, like clockwork, it slumped to -9. I checked the news and, yep, it was China again (my new favorite country). Just LOOK at what the ES has been doing in just the past few sessions.

0107-es

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What’s In Store For Oil?

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We can see from the 3-Year Daily comparison chart below that, for the most part, Gold, Platinum and WTI Crude Oil have traded in tandem, although Oil has seen far more volatile swings.

Since December of last year, Gold and Platinum have attempted to stabilize and rally from their 3-year lows, while Oil’s attempted rally was very short-lived, and price continues to plummet to new lows…we’ll see if today’s (Wednesday’s) volume spike signals capitulation, or not, as shown on the next chart (5-Year Daily).

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