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.

The Upcoming Wave 5 and Other EWT Wet Dreams

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Lots of nervous bulls and excited bears all over the TV the past couple of days … everybody needs to just chill and look at the roadmap.  Everyone loves to call the top and I am as guilty as anyone.  I way messed up calling the top of the 3rd Wave … as it turned out I was looking for Wave 4 when it turned out to be just a more minor/smaller wave iv of the bigger wave 3.

In the end, that early call cost me some lost profit opportunities on the long side as well as some losses on the down side on my shorts.  Good risk management kept those amounts relatively small compared to my gains so far in 2012 however, so I am still pumped about the possibilities of the market going forward.

I find it much easier to calculate the support areas in a market trending higher than trying to pick the tops.  Why is that?  Well I have mentioned in several of my earlier blogs about trying to figure out what what chart time frame is in charge of the current wave structure.

 

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Elliott Wave Mad Libs… Part Deux (by Leaf_West)

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Since Tim loves EWT and can't go 24hrs without poking the bear, I thought I would post the EWT chart for the next couple of days.

SPY 60-Min Chart

SPY_Mar 20, 2012_60min_01

I will repost this chart in a couple of days to show the POWER of EWT … odds are Tim will refuse to post it due to the public embarassment it will cause him (LOL). (Editor's Note – not so! If you or anyone else out there can make good predictive use of this technique, I'm all ears! – Tim)

Cheers … Leaf_West

How You Become a Better Trader (by Leaf_West)

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How do you become a better trader?  Probably for most of us, it can be as simple as looking at our prior trades in retrospect to see if they made sense?

I had a reader e-mail a little while ago and asked about a short trade he tried in the SPY which he covered for a small loss, to see what I thought about the trade … he already knew the answer in retrospect by looking at the trade.  He was caught up in the small time frame chart (1-minute) and didn't realize he was swimming against the current.

In my site's Elliott Wave Theory lesson module I talk about how most day traders never make money and that the biggest reason is as simple as they often trade counter-trend.  The sad thing is that almost all of these traders don't even realize that they are trading against the bigger trend.

That is why I am always looking at where we are in terms of the wave structure on multiple time frames … I want to avoid the simple mistake of getting long at the top of a wave structure (or short at the bottom of one), and I definitely want to know what the direction of the bigger trends are.  That is what my Morning Outlook and Afternoon Trading Plan try to do … assess where the market is going and then trade based on that bigger directional bias.

 

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