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.

Bulls Follow Through

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The first week of July was really about the upside following through based on the overall rounding bottoming pattern and temporary low setup at the 2693.25 low from the last week of June. The market was able to cement the status of temporary low from June, and had a decent “stick save” on Monday July 2 at the 2698.5 lows before closing at the high of the day around 2726 to cement another higher low.
Fast forward, the market tested the key 2740-area resistance for the 3rd or 4th time time later in the week, and was pretty much destined for the breakout like we expected. If you recall, the 2748 and 2758 prior highs level got blown out of the waters on Friday when the acceleration began since the bull train erased all doubts in the minds of traders. Overall, it was a fairly easy week because we’re definitely back in the aggressive BTFD (“buy the f’in dip”) regime as it worked very well for the majority of the week.

The main takeaway from this week was that the weekly candle was able to wrap up its bullish marching band at the highs and it’s a large bull bar. All the trapped bears and bull chasers are now in a vicious cycle on getting squeezed and rushing back into playing the game of BTFD as long as trending support holds for the immediate short-term play. (more…)

Great Bonds of Fire

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It wasn’t that long ago that I didn’t even pay attention to the bond market. Since 2018 began, however, I have followed it constantly, since I believe a sea-change in bonds (and, thus, interest rates) is the only thing left that’ll break equities. If nuclear war can’t do it, maybe soaring interest rates can.

It’s been dicey lately, since bonds have been so strong, but as I pointed out late last week, we were once again getting terribly close to both the topping pattern and the broken trendline:

bigbond (more…)

Trade Wars Good For The Market

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by Avi Gilburt, ElliottWaveTrader.net

If you read most of the analysis being published over the last two days, you would almost assume that the S&P500 should be crashing or be in a bear market. Yet, we are only 4% off the all-time highs struck early this year in the S&P, whereas the Nasdaq and Russell have made new higher highs this summer.

In fact, if you had read the analysis put out over the last two days when further tariffs went into effect, you would have to assume that Friday should have been a major down day in the US markets. This is just an excerpt from a bearish author’s recent article on the US market:

“Virtually all of the market headlines this week centered around the Friday imposition of tariffs by the U.S. on $34 billion in Chinese goods and the immediate reciprocation from Beijing. The duties kicked in at one minute after midnight and marked the most serious escalation yet in the burgeoning global trade war.”

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