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.

Cherry-Coloured Funk

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Shame on me. As the markets exploded yesterday for positively NO reason whatsoever (except Fed jawboning), I wanted to make my short positions even more aggressive near the close, but I chickened out. The /ES ripped almost 100 points higher (again, for NO reason), moving the market from Laughably Overvalued to Insanely Overvalued, and I didn’t do anything about it. It’s no shock that all the equity futures are down right now, but let’s none of us forget the (fake) CPI numbers coming out Thursday morning. That’s a big risk.

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Pattern Ruination

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As valuable as it is to recognize patterns, it is just as valuable to recognize when price action exits a permissible zone. Sometimes this can be in the form of prices just “exiting stage left” from a formation, and other times the pattern will be complete and behaving itself and then suddenly do a 180-degree turn. Here are three examples of topping patterns that DID look good but defied expectations (and should have been aborted when the violation took place).

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Out With The Old Year, In With The New

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Today is the last trading day of 2023, and is the only significantly bearish leaning day this week. Historically the stats today indicate 38.1% stats for SPX closing green, and only 28.6% green closes on NDX. That doesn’t of course mean that the day will be particularly interesting, but intraday at least the last couple of days have been more interesting than I was expecting.

On the bigger picture, I was looking for a retest of the 2023 high on SPX to set possible daily RSI 14 and RSI 5 sell signals brewing, and we saw that. The high this week so far is at 4793.30, just 25 handles below the all time high, and I’m still thinking that a decent retracement looks very close, and that SPX might make a marginal new all time high before we see that retracement.

Either way we appear to be setting up for an interesting January.

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