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.

Roaring Interest Rates

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There is no nuance to what I’m going to say: interest rates are pushing higher, and this is going to be a millstone around the neck of the world economy.

Now, the permabulls have been conditioned over the past six phony years to refute any assertion that anything could be bad for the market. Yesterday, for instance, when I snarkily pointed out ETSY’s horrible performance (which, incidentally, is shadowed by today, which has brought the stock to a new lifetime low). one of the more perpetually bullish Slopers remarked that ETSY’s rotten performance was a sign of a healthy bull market.

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A Decent Start

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That was a decent decline yesterday, though ideally bears should have controlled the close and they didn’t. The minimum requirement on all the various sell indicators that I was looking at on Friday and yesterday morning were met as the 15min and 60min sell signals made target, the RSI5/NYMO sell signal made a visual hit just shy of the 30 level at 31.54. That was a very near miss and I’d count that as close enough, so that is effectively made though usually we would see a close under the 30 level and we’ll most likely see one here as well.

In terms of the stats I was looking at on Friday for series of bearish reversal candles the minimum requirement of a 1.65% decline was met yesterday with move of 1.665% from the all time high into yesterday’s low. Of the nine examples that I listed, two reversed back up to retest the high after that decline, of which one continued the previous uptrend, and the other made a marginal new high before a 9.83% decline from that second high. Six continued down without a retest of the high to a median decline of 4.5% to 5% from the high, and an average (mean) decline of 15%. The odds therefore favor continuation down without a retest by three to one. We shall see how far the bulls can rally today.

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Chop Top

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I’ve been doing more work on the series of bearish reversal candles over the last twenty years and have combed through 90% or so of the intervening period. I’ll finish that at the weekend and may do a dedicated post on these. The ones I have found so far are:

1999 Feb – From 2nd candle into 5% decline
2002 Dec – From 2nd candle into 17.3% decline
2004 Dec – From 2nd candle into 4.46% decline, then marginal higher high, then 7.56% decline
2005 Oct – From 2nd candle into 2.08% decline
2005 Nov – Failed and resumed uptrend into December interim high
2005 Dec – From 2nd candle into 4.44% decline
2007 Oct – From 3rd candle into 57.4% decline
2014 May – From 2nd candle into 1.66% decline
2014 Sept – From 2nd candle into 1.65% decline, then marginal higher high, then 9.83% decline
2015 May – To be determined

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