An Anzani 10-cylinder radial aircraft engine (image via Wikimedia Commons).
(more…)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.
Nightly V
If one were to glance at the headlines this morning, they would assume the market was in a free-fall.
That would be an understandable reaction. When I hit the sack last night, the ES was down something like 35 points. Everything was red. All eyes were on China, as it prepared to unleash the Kraken on Hong Kong. And yet, in our perpetually-captured market………..
(more…)SPX Pivot Point Values For May
The pivot point support/resistant values/targets for the S&P 500 Index (SPX) for the entire month of May are based on the high/low/close of the April monthly candle, as shown on the following pivot point calculator.
Source: nationalfutures.com
(more…)Cracking the Mirror
Trading in the past dozen hours has been awfully peculiar. There was a tremendous war of words between the U.S.and China (which, in a normal market, would have sent the market crashing), and yet this morning equities totally recovered their overnight losses and soared into the green. Again.
As of this moment, things seem to be faltering a bit. The small caps have been very strong for a full week, but if this is as much as they make it, we’ll have a slightly “lower high” on our hands.
Broadly Speaking
As we continue to frantically work in the Slope Labs to finish the alpha version of our latest product, I offer you some updated market charts with some words about each of them in the caption. As a general note about my own trading, I have pushed my commitment level to just above 100% spread among 50 roughly equally-sized short positions. Anyway, here are the charts, any one of which can be made jumbo-size with a click.
Another Inflection Point
In my last couple of posts I was writing about the rally scenarios on SPX and was saying that the recent lower high on SPX increased the chance that the retracement from that high was to finish forming a bull flag that would then break up into a minimum target at a retest of the rally high. The close last Friday back over the daily middle band was a pointer that SPX might be breaking back up, and that has followed through into a retest of the rally high, so that bull flag has broken up and played out. So where does that leave SPX now?
Well the first thing to say here is that the economic situation is not improving. The chart below is the Atlanta fed GDP forecast for Q2 2020 and at the moment that is looking like an expected Q2 2020 GDP in the -32% area. That is dire and it would be tempting to say that it is just deranged to think that stocks can head much higher in this environment. That said though, making money on stocks using economic fundamentals analysis has always been a chancy business and, while new all time highs directly from here look very ambitious, we could well see SPX go a bit higher before economic gravity drags SPX down to the lower lows that history strongly suggests will be coming in the next few months.
(more…)Levels of Recovery
Not much happened overnight, but I did want to point out in broad strokes the distinction in just how much different segments of the stock market have recovered over the past two months, for it was almost exactly two months ago that the selling stopped.
The strongest, by far, is the NASDAQ, which is relatively close to the highest levels in human history. One slightly interesting “achievement” overnight was that it finally sealed up its price gap when all the selling began (marked with an arrow). So the last major price gap is finally filled.
