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.

Occam’s Razor

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I was expecting yesterday’s post to be a bit controversial and it was. However the job of the analyst is to see the evidence, assess it, and analyze the relevant data to reach a conclusion. This might be described as the SAA method. If you reverse this to start with your conclusion, you risk making an AAS out of yourself. 🙂

Occam’s Razor is the proposition that when there are a number of competing hypotheses to solve a problem, then the simplest hypothesis is likely to be the correct one. In essence this is a mathematical expression of the truism that if something looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and acts like a duck, then it’s probably a duck. (more…)

US Dollar and Bonds

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SPX recovered to test the highs on Friday and closed six points below the weekly upper bollinger band at 1639. It’s very rare to see a significant break above the weekly upper bollinger band, and that can only rise at about ten points per week, so we are unlikely to see any powerful further drives up without some consolidation or retracement first. Any immediate weekly rises from this level will be incremental: (more…)

Diamonds Are Bearish

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SPX fell away from the daily upper bollinger band yesterday, so this period of rising up just underneath the upper band has finished. What next? Of the three previous similar instances on the chart below (highlighted blue) two led to periods of sideways consolidation lasting several days, and the third led to a sharp retracement into the daily middle bollinger band, now in the 1587 area:

130510 SPX Daily Trendlines BBs MAs (more…)