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.

The Crumbling VIX

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The $VIX is a curious creature to analyze, since it is such a different beast than most other kinds of charts. To get some fresh perspective, let’s look at some cruder granularities of this sentiment measurement.

First, let’s look at it from a quarterly perspective going back a third of a century. As you can see, the spike we enjoyed in volatility is very prominent, being the third-highest peak in this entire data set. The “Liberation Day” excitement (which feels like, oh, about 70 years ago at this point) was all too brief, but now the VIX is once again at an extraordinarily dull mid-teens level where it typically slumbers.

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A Worrisome Stand-Off

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I wanted to highlight one particular index which has me concerned (as we ‘celebrate” two months of the market going straight up since April 7th): the Russell 2000. What we have here is a bearish setup (pink) and a bullish counter-setup (green) that are about to go to war. The $RUT broke to a new counter-trend peak on Friday, completing and pushing above the bullish pattern, and if there’s enough power to push the index above the dashed red line, well, God help us, quality of life for equity bears is going to recede from a “2” down to a “1”.

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The Overconfidence Trap

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Why Your Best Options Trades Are Setting You Up to Fail

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Faithless & Perverse Generation

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All right, fellas (and Violet), I can see the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. I’m having a grand old time this morning (having woken up at 3:30 a.m., which is when the markets open in Tahiti), yet I’m seeing a lot of chatter about the market closing green and bears getting wrecked and so forth. Take a big step back and look at the /RTY (which, incidentally, has completely bashed in Scott Bessent’s pretty hairdo).

When I was a boy, there was a little poster in my bedroom which said, “Faith can break the sky in two, and let the face of God shine through.” Try that some, except with charts. Tend the garden. Let reason conquer impulse.