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.

Complacency to Fear & Back

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From last evening’s post regarding the measurement of complacency or fear in the markets by using the Equity Put/Call Ratio, I stumbled upon a way of timing when those transitions are underway.

It all started as I was comparing the large negative divergence in the SPX:VIX ratio to the large one I recall from 2007. As I began marking it up, a light bulb went off as I realized that ALL of the major Equity Put/Call reversals had a concurrent divergence on the SPX:VIX chart. I will plot them above each other for easier comparison.

Equity Put Call
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The Carrington Event

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In the wee hours of Thursday morning, I woke up – – out of anxiety, I suppose – – and reached over to grab my iPad. The first thing I saw was a bevy of messages in Telegram, which is never a good sign.

To my alarm, the messages had to do with the site being down. There were two bits of good news. First of all, this was happening at 3 in the morning, and traffic is, shall we say, rather light at that time of day. Second, God bless him, my network engineer was already on the case and had the site back in working order. Sort of. But we’ll get back to that story in a bit.

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Pfuck Pfizer

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I hated Monday morning. Hated, hated, hated. And, even though it was just a few days ago, it’s clear that the assumption behind the mega-rally was as follows:

  1. Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine is 100% effective;
  2. It will be distributed immediately;
  3. 100% of the population will take it;
  4. People will immediately return to living precisely as they were living in December 2019.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Every single one of those things is absolutely false.

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Flatten the Funhouse Mirrors

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Let’s suppose you were about to head outdoors, and you asked me the temperature so you could dress appropriately. “It’s thirty-two”, I tell you. So you slip on a thick coat, a scarf, and a hat, then you head outside.

After you shut the door behind you, the hot air hits you, and you immediately come back inside, furious with me, and change into something more comfortable. I was telling you the truth – – the temperature was, in fact, 32. Celsius. In other words, you should be wearing a short-sleeved Tommy Bahama top and not a thick coat.

Similarly, you might ask me what my father’s salary was when I was a kid. “Thirty-five thousand dollars.” Wow, pathetic, right? How did he support a family of six, and we lived in a nice house? Well, the salary I am telling you about was from decades ago, and it was pretty good money back then.

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