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.
Stock Market Sentiment, Re-Fueled Along the Way
It’s a big picture view with a story to tell. People are micro-managing the VIX, talking about how it either doesn’t work anymore, if it ever did, or is forecasting extreme doom imminently (through investor complacency). But what is “imminently”? Is it next month or is it the 2-3 years that this indicator often wallows along the bottom of its support zone before overseeing a coming Armageddon? Sure, it started wallowing in the zone back in 2013, but then the ‘fuel stops’ that were ultimately bullish (the 2010, 2011 and 2015 corrections) cleared the overhead inventory of investors out of the markets.
Sometimes you’ve got to let a picture marinate and tell its story, not impose your (relatively) hypersensitive brainwaves on it. The story this thing is telling is that Armageddon ’08 surely was a massive sentiment reset (of much greater power and significance than I originally thought it would be, when I got bullish in early 2009). On top of that big sentiment event that cleaned the markets out to a fully sanitized state, there were 3 subsequent eruptions of bearishness that may have reinforced the message of the 2008 disaster, sternly reminding casino patrons that this thing is not safe. (more…)
The Death of ProphetCharts
And of this pleasant garden that I have mostly goodly planted, I will make him gardener for his own recreation….
If all goes as planned, the greatest and most widely-used thing I ever created in my life is going to be snuffed out. ProphetCharts, used by traders all over the world for the past dozen years, is going to be eliminated from existence by those who bought it a dozen years ago.
It was, I suppose, inevitable, but when I first got the news last December, I felt a sadness I didn’t
expect. I would never compare the sense of loss to losing a child – – a pain I pray I never experience and would never wish on anyone – – but it did seem like my “first baby” was being killed, and I felt powerless.
