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.

Deja Vu All Over Again

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In my post at the start of last week I was looking at the escalating economic shock that is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but also noting that the lack of patterns on equity indices from the late March lows were nonetheless looking higher.

US equity indices haven’t gone up a lot since then, with the exception of an impressive performance on QQQ, but I’m still thinking that SPX and QQQ in particular may go higher still and have some trendline targets to put forward in the event that turns out to be the case.

First though I’d like to look quickly at the current status of the Iran War and then take you on a walk down memory lane looking at the weeks before the last really big crisis in equities, which was of course the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020.

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Evening Indexes

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What a strange, strange market we are in. One would think the market would be getting pounded on a daily basis, but just the opposite is happening lifetime highs every single day except for weekends. I am delighted to state that my shorts are holding own beautifully in the face of this, which actually makes a certain amount of sense since the breadth of the market is awful.

The tech stocks just keep muscling to lifetime highs, and the absolute tidal wave of earnings that we’re going to see on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings will either justify these valuations or, at long last, start to punch these prices in the nose.

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In the Mix

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Heading into the weekend, it seemed the big question was how peace talks would go. By Saturday, it was clear that they weren’t even going to take place, which in saner times would have meant a total wipe-out on Monday (that is to say, today).

In fairness, there WAS a gap down on Sunday when the futures opened, albeit a modest one, and even then, the market bottomed within minutes before dusting itself off and moving to LIFETIME HIGHS on the /ES, the /NQ, the /RTY, and any other index you might care to mention.

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The Republic of Itsnosobad

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Happy Friday, everyone. And, as is the tradition on Fridays, the press is in a flurry about peace talks, people flying from here to there, and the possibility that such-and-so will meet with this-and-such.

Look, everyone, it took twenty-one MONTHS for the least nuclear deal to be hammered out over a decade ago, and that was with exceptionally talented parties who were eager to meet steadfastly. This situation is – – different.

In spite of this, the VIX has been steady as a rock all week, trading at pretty much 20.75 more or less a few cents.

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The Four Horsemen

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Cotton, Wheat, Corn and Soybeans

There were four big setups, each covering multiple tickers, that I was looking in my bi-weekly The Bigger Picture webinars last year and at the start of this year that looked very strong, but I was struggling to come up with any decent fundamental reasons why they might play out.

That changed when the US attacked Iran on 28th February, and since then I have been looking at these four big setups as follows:

War – I looked at the oil setups in my posts on 3rd and 13th March. Those setups have made the first targets but haven’t yet made the extension targets at retests of the 2022 highs on $BRENT, $WTIC and $GASO.

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