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.

GD MF SOAB

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Perhaps some of you might think this post’s title represents equity symbols, much in the same way our friend Ryan Mallory offers. Nope. They are the initials spelling out the completely pissed-off obscenities that are bouncing around in my head.

Today is just like yesterday in three respects. ONE, equities dropped hard, pushing up my profit tremendously. TWO, Yellen & Company rushed in to prop up the market yet again, bidding up prices, smashing my profits down. And THREE, oil is completely saving my ass (and my profits). But because of #2 (a digit that often leaps to mind when thinking of Janet Yellen), my profit is a shadow of its former self. Again, just like yesterday.

I’m ready to choke somebody to death.

0901-es

My Friend the Trend

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Well, the completely-fake, utterly-made-up Chinese economic “data” was released yesterday evening (my time), and the ES liked what it saw. It was up about 8 points or so when I went to bed. As of now, it’s down double digits, since maybe people are figuring out that Communists dictatorships will dream up figures month after month to keep themselves in power, and maybe reality isn’t what is being stated.

More important than that to me is crude oil, which continues to be a better arbiter of The Truth than Chinese bureaucrats. Keep falling, fellas. (I took this snapshot before the opening bell; crude is even farther down than it was……..)

0901-crude

Auribus Teneo Lupum

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A less common latin phrase today and this one means ‘holding a wolf by the ears’, and I think that’s a decent description of what we are looking at on equities here with the frankly amazing amount of compression on the daily bollinger bands. My friend Mike Vacchi has looked back ten years and this level of compression is unprecedented in that time and possibly a lot longer. The range between the daily lower and upper band on SPX is down to 26 handles, about 1.2%, so the journey between them is down to a level where Yellen clearing her throat might take SPX from one to the other. What does this mean? Well it may mean that we are building to a very strong move in a direction yet to be determined. A hard compression considerably smaller than this one delivered the mini-crash a year ago. This is the sort of phenomenon that advises caution.

The bears woke up for a while yesterday but failed to take out Friday’s low or sustain the trend down into the afternoon. They did however close well below both the 50 hour MA at 2177 and the daily middle band at 2179.5, so that was still a bearish close, and yesterday’s move could follow through today.

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