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.

Don’t You Dare!

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Well, after nearly an hour of waiting for the Grok 4 livestream to start, I’m just going to compose my last post of the day and send it out, since the livestream is neither live nor streaming.

Simply stated, the market hasn’t gone down since April 21st. Hardly a downtick in sight. For obvious reasons, I am feeling this particularly acutely, and as of Wednesday’s close I was still at a whisper light commitment level of 73% (with one portfolio a vanishingly tiny 23% commitment level, which is just plain sad).

Yet if you look at an of the index charts below over the past three months, not only has the market done nothing but go up, but it has done so with increasingly smooth and predictable regularity. It’s a true bummer. Seriously.

NASDAQ Composite
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The Great Reset

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As The Director can attest (who has to endure SMS texts from me anytime I’m freaking out), I was more than a bit peeved at the market this morning. Whenever I get that way, I take a breath, empty out my Bear Pen completely, and go through my entire Core List to seek out short opportunities. Below are the twenty-seven members, nice ‘n’ fresh, with those in red representing positions I was already in. I’m going to sit tight until after the FOMC Wednesday before expanding into any new positions.

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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