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.

Jerkin Back and Forth

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Yikes! Seeing 7:10 a.m. on my clock this morning was a bit of a shocker, especially for me. You know me better than that. I’m Mr. Up at 5 Without an Alarm, and I won’t offer an excuse except something something Duke Something. Anyway, let’s catch up a bit while we all await Powell.

Over the past 24 hours, we’ve gone absolutely nowhere. The arrow below shows what has transpired between yesterday’s open and today’s on the /ES futures, which is a big fat zero. Now I suspect the market will be in a state of suspended animation until Powell announces the amazing news that interest rates will not be changed.

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Surely That Isn’t All. Right?

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As recently as yesterday afternoon, my persistent hand-wringing about the bounce was in Full Wring mode, and I figured we might be only 40% done with the bounce. I laid out in a premium post over the weekend that we might be in for more teeth-clinching for the VIX to work its way from almost 30 (last week) to maybe half that value.

Let’s just put on our fantasy caps for a minute and suppose that 1400-point rise on the Dow from Thursday’s low to yesterday’s high was sufficient to relieve the oversold nature of the market and that, unbeknownst to us, the nature of the market has changed so severely that the selling has already resumed. With those rosy glasses on our heads, let’s talk about how each of these indexes might continue to get walloped.

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