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.

So Here We Are

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Firstly my apologies for the wait since my last post. I’m currently getting divorced, which isn’t much fun, and the presidential election was so polarising in the US that I was getting the impression that if I mentioned that the weather was getting chillier as the season changed, then some would feel that was a comment on the election and get offended. The election is finally over….ish, and I think it’s safe to start writing again about markets.

So in my last post I was writing about the bull flags that would likely deliver retests of the all time high as and when they broke up. Those evolved into larger bullish patterns, a bull pennant on SPX, a bull flag on INDU, a possibly still forming bullish pattern on NDX, and on Monday those broke up into new all time highs on SPX, Dow 30 and RUT, but not so far on NDX. Equity indices are still retracing from those Monday highs, so what should we expect next?

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Onward and Upward

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Last week I was looking at the IHS patterns that had broken up on SPX and NDX with targets at retests of their respective all time highs. We’ve seen some retracement this week but overall nothing has changed and I am still looking for the same targets, though the retracement has given more form to the current moves and is giving some clues as to where these moves will find resistance.

Starting with ES, where after the grind up on Monday I posted a chart on the subscriber twitter feed at theartofchart.net showing the rising channel established on ES Dec from the September lows, and with a slight adjustment that channel has held into the end of the week with a test of the low before the open yesterday morning. Resistance on that channel is now in the 3600 area so the IHS target is within that range.

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In The Inflection Point

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I was looking at the inflection point setting up here in my post yesterday and it is now fully set up and looking good. At this stage I am looking for either a break up towards a retest of the all time highs on both SPX and NDX, or a hard fail that delivers new retracements lows, though we could see a limited retracement here that preceded the break up.

On the SPX daily chart there is no current divergence but SPX is now testing and slightly over the daily upper band.

SPX daily chart:

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Mundane Objects

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Well I tried to talk about face masks and COVID-19 in my last post and that was my least popular post in years. I would note from the responses that wearing a mask is primarily for the protection of others from those infected with COVID-19, so wearing one is not so much a matter of personal courage as consideration for others. In response to a couple of questions I was asked I would also add that I’m happy to say that I am in a low risk age group, and that the only member of my family in a high risk group has already had and survived the virus so personally I’m not too concerned. Be all that as it may it seems that I should abandon trying to talk about COVID-19 until after the presidential election.

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The Masks We Wear

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I’m planning to drop some COVID-19 info and updates into some of my posts, hopefully in a way that won’t get people thinking that I’m taking a position in the US election, as it is of vital interest for the economy going forward, and there was a time when that mattered for stock markets too, though that seems less certain at the moment.

I was giving the best guess mortality stats for the virus on Tuesday, and just wanted to break those down a bit further. The bottom line really is that, subject to some variations depending on race, sex and existing co-morbid health conditions, and in the event that anyone is actually infected, as many may well never be infected, then the death rate for those in the 12 to 40 age range is about 0.01%, or one in ten thousand, the death rate for people in the 41 to 60 range rises to about 0.1%, or one in a thousand, and the mortality rate rises sharply for those 60 or over to about 2%, or one in a fifty. That last stat is heavily weighted towards the oldest and least healthy in the population, to the extent that the average age of death from COVID-19 among white people in the Indiana study I was referring to was 78.9, with over half of all COV-19 deaths in Indiana among nursing home residents.

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