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.

Turning As Expected So Far

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I’m finding it difficult to get back into doing more than one post a week. I shall try hard to get two out next week. (Editor’s note: cough cough cough!)

On SPX a week ago I was looking for a reversal under declining resistance from the all time high, and ideally a decline and high retest to set up a possible daily RSI 5 sell signal. I got the first of those but not the second.

The decline from the high was too large to set up the RSI 5 sell signal and as time goes by, unless we are going to see a break of declining resistance from the all time high, a high retest is looking less likely as soon it might need to break that resistance to retest the current high.

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Market Thesis 2023 (by Xerxes)

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I’ll get this out of the way and say this year has not started out as I’d hoped. I was hoping for this month to begin the next large downturn, on the cusp of which seems to be never-ending. I have been bearish since early last year, which served me well earlier on in 2022 in the broad market and helped me to get into my TSLA short last year. But something is definitely off about this market now.

We can’t seem to get a consistent rally to break upwards nor a consistent downtrend again to get to capitulation and end this bear market. I have had this thesis early last year regarding the mentality of the overall market, how everyone was truly addicted to the free money we have had for the past 13 years. I have also made the comparison of Jerome Powell to an all-powerful drug dealer providing this drug so willingly for so long. But despite his unwavering commentary that they are going to continue raising rates, the market seems to refuse to believe it. In fact, the market seems to be totally obsessive about it.

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Fed Spread Red

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A few days ago, I read a premium article over on ZeroHedge which went into great detail as to why the three components of what I call the Fed Spread – – most in particularly, the balance sheet – – which render all the Q.T. the Fed is doing moot. In other words, by their arguments, the market was going to roar higher this year anyway. I confess, I felt pretty empty-headed reading the article, because it didn’t really sink in, although it was enough to strike fear into this bear’s heart.

I was reminded of this just now, since it looks like our predictor of near-term S&P prices enjoyed a rise. It’s still beneath present price levels, but the gap is definitely getting smaller. Here are the three individual elements:

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Thrust THIS

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Let us think back to Slope’s darkest days. That would be, oh, about 48 hours ago. Those were grim times. The bulls seemed to own the market again. Bears had been beaten across the face fairly consistently since October 13, 2022, a day I shall remember until my last breath. Sentiment on Slope was turning fiercely anti-bearish and, God forbid, even anti-Tim. And, as always, people came out from the woodwork claiming that, being better than the rest of us, they were never bearish nor bullish, Nay, nay. They simply made money, no matter what. Every single time. Thus pitying us poor saps who actually had an opinion. And, as a topper, they trotted out some retired money manager in his 70s who had created some weird-ass arithmetic hack called the Whaley Breadth Thrust which was supposed to be God’s gift to investors and was correct 100% of the time, even though it sounded like it was taken straight from the Kama Sutra. Thus, they claimed, a New Bull Market was here, and bears were about to get destroyed, as they most deservedly should be.

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