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.
Fiscally Imprudent
My good Parisian friend Serge just sent me an interesting illustraton of financial fund XLF and its RSI.
The Bull Case (by Springheel Jack)
I'm going to take a little time today to put the case for the new bull market from the October low. Negative divergences against equities here are very numerous, and for that reason bear market continuation looks more likely to me, but it would be a mistake to think that the bulls have no case here, and I'll be outlining what I see are the main planks of that case from a technical perspective.
In the short term support on the ES rising channel is clearly still holding, and until that breaks there's not much to see on the bear side here. The upper trendline of the channel is in the 1312 area, and ES has moved up an impressive nine points in the hour since I capped this chart to beat the last high. There might be more coming. Channel support is at 1282.5 this morning:
Following Up: Optimal Hedging Costs — a Tell For Stocks?
Happy New Year, Fellow Slopers,
I hope 2012 is a good one for each of you, and for our host.
Lessons from last year
In his post Monday ("A Major Lesson from Last Year"), Tim wrote about two of the most famous hedge fund managers who are long BAC and SHLD, respectively. There's a third money manager (this one a mutual fund guy, rather than a hedgie), whose shareholders had the misfortune of him being long both BAC and SHLD last year: Bruce Berkowitz, Morningstar's "domestic stock fund manager of the decade" for the first decade of this new century:
Meet the domestic stock fund manager of the decade
Chart Analysis of BAC (by Mike Paulenoff)
Apart from the fact that Bank of America (BAC) is up 3% the day after it hit a low 4.93 yesterday, the lowest level since March 2009, let's notice that current strength has not inflicted any meaningful technical damage to the nearest-term downtrend — at least not yet.
BAC must hurdle and sustain above 5.23 to inflict preliminary technical damage. However, upside continuation that climbs above 5.29/30 to hurdle my 30-period exponential moving average is needed to really get my attention on the long side of BAC.
That EMA tracks directional price movement very closely, and in the recent past has thwarted upside continuation on all (failed) rally efforts. Inability of BAC to hurdle the 30-period EMA will keep me neutral to bearish.
Originally published on MPTrader.com.
