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.

Long, Long Wicks

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In the parlance of candlestick charting, a “wick” is the skinny line protruding either above or below the color rectangle (known as the “body”), and long wick typically denote volatility and uncertainty. The year 2020 was certainly chockablock with wicks, and below are eleven charts, constructed with annual bars, with some comments in each captioned area.

The only graph that consistently has long wicks is, understandably, volatility itself. This year was remarkable in the sheer length of the upper wick and the fact that its peak matched that of the global financial crisis in late 2008.
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A Most Interesting Year

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Tomorrow is the last trading day of 2020 and with New Year’s Day on Friday we get another long weekend into the start of 2021 next week. This has been a really interesting year, though a very hard one for many, and will leave a legacy for economies and markets that will likely ripple through the next few years. We’ll see how that develops in 2021.

At the end of every year we like to do a free public webinar or two at theartofchart.net looking at where we see markets going over the next year, and we are doing the ones for next year tonight and tomorrow. All are welcome and the first  webinar we are running is at 5PM EDT tonight (Wednesday 30th January) looking at equity indices, FAANG stocks and key sector ETFs and, if you’d like to attend, you can register for that here. The second webinar is at 5PM EDT tomorrow (Thursday 31st January) looking at commodities including metals, energies, softs, meat and grains and, if you’d like to attend, you can register for that here. As always all webinars are linked from our monthly free webinars page at our blog, currently December.

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Thanksgiving Thoughts – Shorter Term

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November is about to end and SPX is likely at the time of writing to do something not previously done in the last twenty five years, which is to close a long way above the monthly upper band, currently 3566 area, only three months above the last strong punch close above in August. What does this mean?

Well on NDX this would give about 40-45% odds that the market would then deliver a series of closes at or above the monthly upper band in coming months, but while that is possible on SPX, historically there would be little precedent for it. The odds still favor a close at or below the monthly upper band at the end of December, at which point it would be unlikely to be over 3600.

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