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.
Preface to all three parts: This is going to be a quiet weekend, so I am sharing my 45 short positions in three equal parts. I have made a point of showing the entire graph, so you get the “big picture” view (click any chart to enter gallery mode for huge charts). I must say, as nettlesome as the market has been, these are all really beautiful setups.
It’s been an exciting week, with wild moves, bold pronouncements about markets, terrible economic news, expectations about interventions by governments, the number of US confirmed cases of COVID-19 climbing over a million, deaths from COVID-19 in the US climbing over 60,000 and over 235,000 worldwide. Exhausting and TGIF.
So what happened on the SPX over the course of the week? Well SPX closed last Friday at 2836.74, and closed tonight at 2830.71, so it dropped 6.03 handles over the week. Like a rollercoaster it was a wild ride that ultimately stopped sedately back where it started.
(more…)I have a gap in my work schedule this morning as we wait for the Fed this afternoon, so I thought I’d do a quick update on the inflection point that SPX has reached today, and talk about why the still very pervasive faith in the power of the Fed to keep asset prices up should not just be dismissed as irrational.
For me I look at the Fed and I know that I don’t see what most others seem to see, as I see a track record of successively larger failures that have created a Fed seemingly capable of trying anything to try to keep asset prices high, for fear that a serious decline in asset prices might unleash an economic whirlwind that they could not hope to control. They have my sympathy but, based on their track record, not my respect, and here is my image choice for the Fed today. If you’re enjoying some of the great demotivational posters that I’ve been using in a lot of my recent posts, and on and off for much of the last decade, check out the author website at despair.com for some good laughs and amusing gift ideas.
(more…)I have a Shakespeare theme with the title today, which is a quote from Richard III. I am a lifelong Shakespeare lover and have been using some of my quarantine time watching film versions of some of his plays, of which I have about thirty or so in total, many of which were beautifully done. Over the weekend I was watching The Tempest 2011 with Helen Mirren, Macbeth 2015 with Michael Fassbender, and Roman Polanski’s Macbeth from 1971, controversially filmed just two years after the Manson Family tragically murdered Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate and their unborn child.
All good films, though I do struggle with Shakespeare’s great tragedies as I find the main protagonists very unsympathetic. Hamlet is forever looking for excuses not to act, King Lear brings ruin upon himself through his foolish actions at the start of the play but the strangest of all to my eyes is Macbeth.
(more…)I know how hung up we all can get on the tick-by-tick of the markets. But take a huge step back with me and just drink in the long-term chart of the Dow Jones Composite. This has a mere two trendlines on it, but I think it speaks volumes. Click on it to fill your screen with the chart.
The drop in crude oil the past couple of months has been absolutely unprecedented and is already in the process of reshaping the financial landscape for years to come.
In the grand scheme of things, consider the area above current price on the following 50-year (monthly) chart of the SPX as the top of an iceberg…and the area below as its foundation beneath the surface of an ocean.
There is a fundamentally-solid foundation of (economic) support below the surface to keep the U.S. economy afloat in these turbulent times.
