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.
Due to some of the speculation around the slope about the effects of an election on the market, I decided to look at the last 20 years of elections. They’re a pretty mixed bag among the lot. Some were steadily uptrending the month prior, some were in choppy ranges, and some sold off for a couple weeks and rallied right back.
I sum it up to useless data. No edge there. Carry on as if wasn’t happening.
I don’t have a trade for you all in this post, but I just wanted to quickly share the VIX and its tendencies for forecasting the S&P500’s potential. First, I want to point out the uptrend line in the VIX right now. I’ve highlighted the times when VIX has returned to those trendlines in the past year. At most, price has returned to the highs during such declines, but once the VIX trendline is hit, caution is very warranted, especially since sometimes, that touch then launches actual sustained selling periods.
I made a minor mistake on the chart below. You should note to ignore the first decline in each cluster because that was the decline that established the trendline before which none existed. Before these trendlines were broken, there was always a meaningful spike in the VIX first. This doesn’t always happen, but once it does, upside is the path of least resistance.
If there’s one clear downtrend out there (which has been in place for – what – decades now?) it’s interest rates, in spite of all the blather about “normalization” (news flash: it ain’t gonna happen, folks). Here’s the $TNX, with the persistent series of lower highs marked:
