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.

Deprogram Yourself

By -

Robot-48x48The title of this article is not an assumption that you, astute reader, are little more than a robot following the direct and implied commands of other robots when trying to make logical sense of the state of modern financial markets. Personally, I have found that I need to stay on a path of post-deprogramming maintenance in order to stay right with a complex market backdrop.

On an inward-looking basis, we as investors and traders are faulty humans going up against robots (Ref. Rise of the Quantitative Robots) that are much smarter than we are with numbers, with data mining and with extrapolation. What do we have, puny little human brains with all associated biases, ego distortions and other faults? Yes, that is us.

(more…)

A Statistical Slice of 2013

By -

I was mentioning yesterday that the stats for today historically are strongly bullish. Dow has been up 16 of the last 21 first trading days of April. Does this mean that the market can’t close down? No, but it does mean that the bears are playing a game today with the odds heavily stacked against them, and the obvious lean is for a green close unless we see very strong evidence to the contrary. In effect the first trading day of April is a little slice of the year that is forever 2013, and that was a very bad year to lean short.

I mentioned the obvious retest and support level at the SPX 50 hour MA yesterday morning and that was tested this morning, and so far is holding. As long as that remains the case then I’m looking for a retest of the current rally high at 2072, though I’d note that the break below trendline support on the possible larger rising wedge that I pencilled in yesterday morning means that the odds of going much higher than that retest have dropped considerably. SPX 60min chart:

160401 SPX 60min Topping Options

(more…)