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.
Failure to Bank
I’ve had this post in my head for about a week now, although I’ve been debating whether to write it or not. The reason for my hesitation isn’t because what I have to say is particularly shameful (“I have a secret fetish related to capuchin monkeys………”) but it is one of those Earnest Trader posts which is prone to attracting stupid/obvious advice or, even worse, criticism. Part of the reason for Slope’s success, however, has been my openness, and I have no intention of changing that.
To come right to the point, even though we’re just a little bit into 2016, I have twice had “peak profits”, only to see the majority of them wither away. More specifically, I managed to put together a very handsome profit, peaking on January 20 (which happens to be the day I saved those two puppies in the park), only to see most of those profits get torched (see first green tinting below). A subsequent drop in the market allowed me to rebuild those same profits, step by painful step, to enjoy an even greater total profit by February 11th (second green tinting below) after which time the vast majority of those profits were, in turn, torched. (more…)
Market Volatility Now In “Fragile Zone”
Further to my post of December 3, 2015, the price of the SPX:VIX ratio has broken below a critical level of 100.00 and has fallen into, what I call, the Fragile Zone.
I named it this because, as you can see from the ratio chart below (where each candle represents 1/4 of a year), price has now encroached into the last major bearish candle of Q3 of 2011, and has also fallen below the 60% Fibonacci retracement level taken from the 2009 lows of this ratio to its highs of 2014.
A hold below 80.00 could see the SPX plunge, particularly if this ratio drops and holds below 60.00. The declining Momentum indicator is hinting that further weakness is ahead for the SPX…as I mentioned here, with respect to the E-mini Futures Indices.
Just Two More Days
As I wrote on Christmas Eve, my plan was to ride out the last four trading days of the year without any positions. It’s been pretty agonizing, because I am dying to get very aggressively positioned, and in spite of the market’s surge lately, a lot of my best short picks are falling to pieces. All the same, I am gritting my teeth and counting the hours until this year is over. Just two days to go.
The Dow Composite is still tracing out a series of lower highs.
My Two Big 2015 Errors
It’s a little early, I suppose, to be doing any kind of “end-of-year wrap-up” kind of post, but frankly, I don’t have anything new to say about the market, and I might as well share the one semi-pithy reflection I’ve got about 2015 at the moment.
My two errors this year actually contradict one another. My first error was not holding on to positions long enough. My other error was holding on to them for too long.
To address the first error: as some readers may recall, I made a post back in November 2014 called Shifting Sands which, even at the time I marked as a “Best of Slope” post since I considered it so important. My basic thesis was that oil producers were going to be wrecked, just like gold miners had. As I wrote, “I am inclined toward individual energy-related shorts, because I think they’re going to suffer the same gruesome fate as precious metals miners have”
