I’d like to suggest American Express (AXP) as an intriguing long-term short sale.
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.
Fiscal Flop
Today was an important step forward in the market’s breakdown. When the biggest banks, which have unlimited access to however many trillions of dollars they demand from the US Government, can’t manage to blow earnings expectations out of the water, you know something is wrong. From a charting perspective, the financial sector leaped to the other side of its breakout (note arrows), thus completing a failed bullish breakout.
Friday Morning’s Banks
The earnings season for Q4 2021 begins in earnest tomorrow morning, and as is customary, the banks lead it off. I guess the banks go first since it’s so simple to calculate profits when all they have to do is ask for free money from the government. Here are the “big four” that declare their criminal, ill-gotten gains before the opening bell:
Bonds & Banks
It has strengthened a bit since I took this screenshot, but I wanted to point out that bonds, by way of the TLT fund, have closed their price gap and look poised to rally (as counter-intuitive as that may seem in a world of ostensibly rising interest rates):
The Afternoon Key
I’m having a good day so far. Of course, every person reading this is at the mercy of Pencil Dick (AKA Jerome Hayden Powell) and his evil band of pranksters that are darkening the innards of the Eccles Building. I would suggest to you that the finance sector fund, symbol XLF, is absolutely key this afternoon.
The post-Thanksgiving gap and the broken trendline are allies of the bears. The ally of the bulls, damn them all, is that cluster of activity I’ve emphasized below. I believe it would be nigh impossible to break through that, at least today, but if we can at least start to push back into that zone, that will be a very encouraging sign for the ursine crowd. There is no sector more represented in my 30 positions than finance, so………...fingers crossed.
I’m probably going to “go dark”, perhaps even until the close, given the mayhem that Pencil Dick is going to thrust upon us.