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.

Crosseyed and Painless

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As much as I’d love to pretend things are just hunky-dory, they’re not. This market has (for me, at least) really been a nightmare lately. The big picture bear tops aren’t broken (yet!) but after last Thursday, the bulls have been gaining power and momentum.

Looking at the Dow Composite, the descending channel is still completely intact, and all the up and down action over the past couple of months may ultimately turn out to be nothing more than just another pattern-within-a-pattern in the context of a generally descending market.

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Shorting Shoes

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In case there are still any people lunatic enough to short into this insane market, I have an idea for you to consider: Discount Shoe Warehouse. It fell hard yesterday, and I told myself if it ever rallied back to its gap, I’d like to short it. Well, that didn’t take long, because the very next day (that would be today: the math checks out) it did rally, so I’m short.

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Expecting Some Downside

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SPX broke back over the middle band yesterday with some confidence, and I was going to be writing this morning about the bears needing to put in a strong reversal candle today to avoid the daily upper band at 2088 becoming a strong target. As the morning high so far is at 2089 I’ll be skipping that part, and talking about the likely retracement that we should nonetheless see starting today. There is now no reason to think that we would see a strong reversal daily candle today, but nonetheless we should at least see a decent retracement and maybe more.

Where does this leave the indices on the bigger picture? Well as long as the daily middle band holds as support on the retest I think we may be about to see, then the obvious next target on SPX is a retest of the swing high at 2111. I also have an open double bottom target on NQ that I’ll be showing below that will be worth bearing in mind.

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Next Mover: Inventory Report

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It’s been another everything-is-grinding-higher (except gold, of course) night session, although crude has lost some of its earlier verve after yesterday evening’s API report. The next “event” is the weekly inventory report from U.S. Energy as we approach the $50 mark. The outcome of this report will help determine whether or not I decide to pursue one of the exciting work-at-home opportunities on the Internet we see in comments from time to time.

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