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.

A Worrisome Stand-Off

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I wanted to highlight one particular index which has me concerned (as we ‘celebrate” two months of the market going straight up since April 7th): the Russell 2000. What we have here is a bearish setup (pink) and a bullish counter-setup (green) that are about to go to war. The $RUT broke to a new counter-trend peak on Friday, completing and pushing above the bullish pattern, and if there’s enough power to push the index above the dashed red line, well, God help us, quality of life for equity bears is going to recede from a “2” down to a “1”.

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Wake Up!

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My natural alarm clock (AKA my brain) fails to wake me up for the market perhaps twice every year, and this morning was one of those times. As one might guess, puppy duties were the cause, which is pretty much the best reason one can imagine, but nonetheless, I was surprised to see the clock read 6:36 a.m. when my eyes popped open.

No harm came of it, however. Of my 25 short positions, 20 of them are down, and the 5 that aren’t are up an average of half a percent, so, meh, I’m fine.

More broadly speaking, the /RTY futures are still sporting a pitch-perfect reversal away from their Fibonacci retracement level and, I would hasten to mention, Bear Force One launches just after the close on Thursday. It’s a BIG trip, too, so if the market plunges on Friday, you know precisely who gets the credit.

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Four Against the Wind

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There’s nothing easier in the world than offering up short-sale ideas when the market is in a free-fall. Of course, that’s also the most hazardous time. Conversely, there’s nothing harder than daring to offer up such ideas when the market is in up-every-single-day mode, as it is now, but I’m going to do it anyway. Before I do, let’s take a quick look at the /ES futures since April 21st, which was only three weeks but about 800 points ago!

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