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.

People of the Lie

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Let’s start off with a simple fact: out of 100,000 people, you’ll find maybe one true bear among them. There’s hardly anyone that’s ever going to posit a bearish argument about the stock market, because they have no vested interest in doing so. Not the carnival barkers on CNBC. Not the equity-pushers from Goldman Sachs, And, God knows, never, ever from any Wall Street analyst. 365 days out of every year, their message is the same: “Buy, Buy, and Buy some more.”

Thus, it is no surprise that we’re seeing a particular “fact‘ being pushed onto the public, stating in no uncertain terms that there has never been an instance in the history of the universe when a market has recovered more than 50% of its price plunge and failed to soar forward into a new bull market. I am seeing this argument absolutely slathered all over Twitter………..

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A Difficult Prospect (by XerxesTraderGF)

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I’ll start by stating the obvious: It’s been a rough month to be a bear. I had warned about 3920 being a devastating technical level should we break above it. I’ll also admit that my “warning” was more for myself as others were already sounding the BULL alarm prior to that, but that was my technical level to watch. SPX successfully broke above that descending channel on July 19 and has continued a powerful rally since then, breaking through an important technical resistance zone, specifically 4080-4180. And here we are now thrust up just under 4300. Trying to come up with a bearish case is a very difficult prospect given this straight shot up. However, I would expect some volatility to reenter the market at the nearby technical levels as I expect anyone who got long near 3900 would like to take some profits near 4300 at the very least.

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1929… Won’t Go Away

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I have been a long time user of analogs. I like looking to history to see how it echoes back against us, again and again. I have studied the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression at length. As a result, when I see patterns in today’s market, they sometimes remind me of patterns that I have seen before in markets of the past.

I had that experience again yesterday and today with the chart below. I recognized that SPY this year has been acting a lot like INDU acted in 1929, but on a slightly different timeframe. The 1929 chart shows roughly six weeks of trading action. The SPY chart shows all of 2022 thus far. History books can tell you what happened next.

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