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.
Canadian Economy: A Warning?
In my post of January 8, 2012, there was much talk of a potential recession coming to Canada.
Since then, you can see from the 5-Year comparison chart below of Canada’s TSX and EEM (Emerging Markets ETF), that they have traded, essentially, lock-step. Both are in bear markets since their highs in September 2014 — the TSX is -20.8% and EEM is -33.79%.
RL Track Records 2012-2016
Today we are going to do something different: often we receive enquiries from prospects that would like to know about the type of returns that can be obtained using the Retracement Levels models. We know from incubator accounts traded with real money and also from backtesting of our models that certain type of results are possible and are certainly above simple BUY & HOLD returns, however for a number of reasons it is not possible to provide this information to our clients because:
a) trading is so personal and each trader inevitably blends his own bias into our systematic strategy/model, so in the end not all traders will follow our system to the letter
b) most traders will fail even if you give them all the tools and support to be successful, because trading is very difficult, it requires capital, stomach, self-control, far-reaching intelligent/strategic thinking and unfortunately it’s hard to find all these qualities in one single individual (that is also why we want to use computers to trade or to support our investment decisions).
AAPL: Who Knew???
In Chicago we have a saying – the tape doesn’t lie.
Check out the open interest for the February 2016 option contracts on AAPL prior to earnings today. This snapshot was taken at approximately 11:28AM ET on January 26 (the morning before the earnings release) and AAPL was trading right around $100 at the time. Open interest suggests many permabulls were loading up in the days leading up to Tuesday’s earnings release.
Then, check out the disparity in put option contract volume today. Who knew?
Where will AAPL head on Wednesday? The market maker move was anticipated at roughly +/- $6 above or below that nice round $100 level. What will AAPL do on Wednesday? Who knows.
A Tale of Two Markets
It was the bearst of times. It was the worst of times.
Heh. OK. Now that we got that out of the way………
Anyway, my portfolio is presently 70% in shorts (70 of them, in fact) and 30% in cash. I am thus “cautiously pessimistic” about the market, in spite of Yellen and Kuroda coming up this week (the AAPL risk has passed, as the stock seems to be simply leaking a little bit lower and is most definitely not inspiring folks about the wonderful earnings season).
