The only appropriate bar for the past two weeks, as far as I’m concerned:
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.
Thing One Violated
In yesterday afternoon’s post, I described the day as “taking the wind out of my sails.” Well, today went ahead and just took the sails themselves. Excuse my bluntness, but God damn it, what happened to our breakdown? The Powers That Be seem to be intolerant of anything more than a few percentage points to the downside before they crank up the buy programs again. It’s revolting.
With all this strength, the ES has cut above the “Thing One” level I mentioned yesterday, and now we’re into the DMZ. There’s very little holding the market back from marching up to somewhere south of 2000. If the bulls were waiting for an opportunity, it has arrived.
Change of Plans
Well, this sucks. Mr. Permabear is looking at numbers that would normally have him dancing on his desk. However, in a perverse twist of date, he has no positions at all, either long or short, and this is one of those days that will be permanently seared into his memory. FOMO has a basis after all. I’m missing out.
It would be foolish, I think, for me to clamor into shorts at this point, no matter how elegant the charts. Instead I think I will focus on those sectors which, until today, have been beaten to pieces (energy and precious metals) on the long side, but on a fairly small scale.
Suffice it to say that I hardly slept at all last night, and starting the first trading day of the year with my stomach tied up like a knot is hardly a propitious beginning. Below you can see where the ridiculous and logic-free Santa Clara rally died:
Two Ways Of Hedging ATVI
Our Current Number One Stock: Activision Blizzard
Activision Blizzard (ATVI), which just announced its purchase of King Digital (KING), the Dublin-based maker of the Candy Crush mobile game, currently has the highest potential return of any security in Portfolio Armor‘s universe, at 20.8%. Potential return, in our terminology, is a bullish estimate of how a security will perform over the next 6 months. Below, we’ll explain how we calculate potential return, and then we’ll show a couple of ways of hedging ATVI.
How We Calculate Potential Return (more…)
The Spoilers Today
What a crummy day for your beleaguered host!
The core problem, of course, was my idiotic refusal to accept the reality that if Gartman had turned bearish on crude oil, then the downturn was completely through. My portfolio is fairly heavily influenced by crude oil (in spite of me having no position in it directly), so the benefit that crude’s weakness had been giving me in recent days was totally ruined today. It was ugly.
Even worse, though, was what happened with small caps (to which likewise my portfolio is inversely correlated). Let’s take a glance at today’s action:
