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.

Crude Oil About to Hit a Slippery Spot?

By -

Contributed by Rohit Goel 

Crude Oil prices have been on a wild ride over the last couple of years, dropping from $100+ in late-2014 to $26 in early-2016, then miraculously doubling over the next few months. As the Energy Information Administration (EIA) explains, there are several factors influencing oil markets, such as production, economic growth, geopolitical and economic events, supply disruptions, speculator and money manager positioning etc. In addition, US Dollar also has a significant inverse relationship to oil prices.

However, the major reason for oil’s plunge since late-2014 was Saudi Arabia blocking an OPEC output cut in November 2014, with the intent of pushing oil prices lower, inflicting serious pain on the US shale oil industry (which needs high oil prices to break even) and increasing their own market share – so essentially, increased supply. The best gauge of how this increased supply has caused an imbalance in the global oil market is the EIA inventory report, which is released every Wednesday morning and has a big impact on oil prices. So let’s compare the price of WTI with the EIA inventory, starting in Jan 2013 when the market was in a steady state and remained so for the next year and a half (the period highlighted in yellow denotes the peak summer driving season – more on this later):

(Note from Tim: there appeared at this point a very large table, which I’m going to leave out, since the information is expressed in graph form anyway). (more…)

AM Low Then Go

By -

That was a strong retracement yesterday and the H&S targets that I was talking about on ES and NQ yesterday morning slightly sceptically have been made. What happens today is very important as the scenario that Stan and I are running here is that ES has broken up from a triangle into last week’s high, and the sequence after this kind of triangle break is a backtest of the triangle, which is happening now, and then the main triangle thrust up begins. Ideally that means we see a low on ES this morning, very possibly reverse yesterday’s move entirely over the rest of the day, and then thrust up to a retest of the all time high over the rest of the week. After that triangle thrust ends we should see a full retracement back to the level of this morning’s low and then we’d expect that to be the start of the larger retracement down that I’ve been talking about.

(more…)