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.

Dud.

By -

I lost 1% today. My trades were all pretty much duds. I took damage from my TLT and GDX shorts. I got out of my GLD short at a small profit. I am still long BA. But on the whole, I felt rather “out of synch“‘ today. Given how fantastic the past month has been, meh, I can live with it. I just forgot was it was like to end the day in the red.

Still, I’m not sure how much “synch” there exists that one can be “in” with at all. This market is unrepentant chop. One glance at the ES shows that all we’ve doing is banging around in a slightly lower range.

ranges
(more…)

The Dawning Realization

By -

We’ve had about 18 months of trading activity compressed into a month. It was precisely thirty days ago that the market was at its highest level in human history. As of today, the Russell 2000 was at the same level it was in the year 2014. Six years of gains destroyed in thirty days. Amazing.

I started to wonder: “When did Slopers start to sit up and take notice about this virus?” It’s a little difficult. See, the past ten years, there have probably been twenty to thirty “big deals’ (especially if you read ZH) that turned out to be absolutely nothing. So I suspect when people started talking about this strange new disease from China, a lot of us gave it scant attention.

I poked around a little bit, and it looks like the first reference to “corona” was back on January 21st:

(more…)

The Bottom Is In

By -

I am known for my clever post titles (at least to myself). This particular one has a meaning which depends on what the market does from here on out. If we go ripping higher from here, we can applaud my ingenious chart-based clairvoyance. If we continue to plunge, I’ll deny any equity-oriented assertion, and state that I simply believe the fetishazation of posteriors is prevalent, and for reasons I cannot fully understand, the bottom is “in”. Dig me, Daddy-O?

Having provided myself an Exit door, I will say the following:

(more…)