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.

What a Difference Six Years Makes

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There was a time, many years ago, that Netflix was this scrawny little small-cap stock of a firm that mailed DVDs to monthly subscribers. I was an early user of Netflix, and I absolutely loved it. (They are based here in the Bay Area). No one dared dream they would have a market cap of over $160 billion, as they do today. If you told someone ten years ago that Netflix would dwarf General Electric in terms of value, they would have laughed you right out of the room.

Although it’s a darling these days, six years ago, Netflix was absolute dog meat. They had introduced a product called Qwikster, which was considered the biggest product debacle since New Coke. By late summer of 2012, the stock had fallen 80%. Now just take a moment and consider that. Try to imagine, say, Amazon falling from 1844 to 377 in the span of a few months. On top of this, it’s not like they were in the throes of an economic meltdown. This was 2012, when the recover and QE fever were all the rage. So NFLX was garbage, and the news media reflected it: (more…)

The Paper Towel Market

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Those of us of a certain age will recall a frequent television commercial for paper towels illustrating how much more absorbent they were than the competition. They were described as “the quicker picker-upper“, and their absorbent qualities would be illustrated thusly:

It occurs to me that this is precisely the kind of market we are in right now. If bad news comes, sure, there might be a day or two of rumbling and hand-wringing, but it all gets absorbed, it all gets digested, and everyone moves on. Recent history has been just another example of this resilience. All the horror about a global trade war seems to have been shrugged off in a matter of three days. (more…)

VIX “Normal” Price Range Using TPO Profile Study

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TPO stands for Time Price Opportunity. By using a TPO profile chart, you are able to analyze the amount of trading activity, based on time, for each price level that the market traded at for any given time period. The Point of Control (POC) is the price where it spent the most time during that period and in that timeframe.

If you look at the following monthly chart of the VIX with the TPO profile study added to it along the right hand side, you’ll see that its POC (on a monthly basis) since 1986 is 20.53.

Whereas, the TPO POC on a daily timeframe from 1986 is 14.66, as shown on the daily chart below.

This tells me that the average “normal” range of the VIX during the past 33 years is between 14.66 and 20.53, regardless of its trading activity on either a monthly or daily timeframe.

I’d also go a bit further and say that any time it traded outside that range for any length of time, it was “unusual” and, therefore, unsustainable…something to consider when you’re taking longer position trades in equities.

As of Thursday’s close, the VIX was trading in “unusual” territory at 13.23…below the “normal” range, where it has spent most of its time since the November 2016 general election.

The last time it spent the majority of its time below the “normal” range was from 2005 to 2007 leading up to the 2008/09 financial crisis. (more…)

The Ceaseless Ascent

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Well, I’m glad the site is doing so well, because the markets over the past week have made me feel pretty lousy. It’s nice to at least have Slope humming along to comfort me.

I’d like to offer the following off-the-wall musings as a very different take on the market. It’s a disposition that many, many people share, and perhaps it would help me get in sync with the rest of the planet to actually type what everyone else is thinking. I submit this to be neither facetious nor wry. So here goes.

(1) Just as humanity as made sufficient advancements in technology to, for example, feed everyone on the planet, so, too, have we reached a sophistication in knowledge and financial management rendering bear markets permanently extinct. Yes, there will be occasional dips from time to time (see green tints), but these will swiftly be pushed aside by a new ascent. If a solid decade of evidence isn’t enough, I’m not sure what is.

upconstant (more…)