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.

BonbonBONDs

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The bond market, known as the debt or the credit market, is where investors go to buy and sell debt securities issued by corporations or governments. The U.S. bond market is more than 30 percent larger than the stock market in terms of total value of securities traded.

Bonds are given an investment grade, denoting the risk a bond has of defaulting. A bond with a “AAA” or “A” rating is high-quality, while an “A”- or “BBB”-rated bond is medium risk. Bonds with a BB rating or lower are considered to be high-risk.

Bonds are susceptible to risks such as inflation and interest rates.  Aren’t those key topics of the day/month/year? So. Shouldn’t we be paying attention?

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Neat and Tidy

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Despite priding myself on organization, my watchlists in SlopeCharts have become anything but and are instead a hot mess of charts not reviewed in months (and in many cases, years). Oh, dear. Goes to show how leaving for tomorrow what can be done today, has a way of messing things up.

Taking watchlist cleanup on as challenge, I began the process thinking there would be plenty of purging, but so far, that’s not been the case.  I started with just the “short” watchlists, four of them totaling 178 issues, and haven’t nearly gotten through those.  Another factor is that most of the charts I’ve reviewed so far still deserve the “short” classification.

Starting with good ol’ almighty SPY, here are a few charts plucked from the still-messy short watchlists. [Note for all charts: green and red horizontals represent the top and bottom of the Ichimoku Cloud.]

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Not Slim Pickens

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There is no shortage of charts with actionable setups. Pickens are not slim. There is a veritable abundance of issues, especially during this earnings season, and here are four.

META has been a hard nut to crack.  If it is going to crack, purple reigns in the near term.

Price is above the Ichimoku Cloud (thin as a rail, it is), and in a short term downtrend from what may be a double top.

A formidable bearish rising wedge broke the highs in September 2021.

How formidable is the current rising wedge?  The negatively diverged indicator would have price falling.

Earnings are October 25.

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PREMIUM: Monthly Matters (by Violet)

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Preface by Tim: this is the 2,484th premium post ever published on the Slope of Hope website. Historically, premium posts have been invisible to non-premium (that is to say, Gold/Platinum) members. I have done myself no favors because of this, since it would be smarter to at least let their existence be known so that, sooner or later, some of you would want to see what all the fuss is about and go ahead and subscribe yourselves.

It’s actually more work for me to do it this “semi-visible” way, but besides making the premium content’s existence more visible, it should also help make comments more clean and non-segmented. There’s always been a bit of confusion about the two universes of premium and non-premium when it comes to comments, and I think this should eliminate that.

In any case, unless I’m not thinking of a reason to do it the old way, this is going to be The New Way of doing things for premium posts: everyone will see the headline and maybe a couple of sentences, but only Gold/Platinum (and, rare, also Bronze/Silver) folks will actually see the content of the post itself.

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