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 January Barometer

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I’ve been promising a post talking about the January Barometer, which is a statistic from the Stock Trader’s Almanac, something that I have been buying every year for many years as it has a lot of very useful information for traders and investors.

This statistic looks at all Januarys that have closed down since 1950 and what happened over the rest of the year from there, and on those years overall. The stats for the rest of the year are that 59.7% of them close down for the overall year, and 48.7% close the year lower than that close at the end of January, which was at 4515.55 this year of course.

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Finely Balanced

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In my last post I was looking at strong daily lower band rides on SPX that have the daily lower band ride as intraday resistance, rather than as support as would be the case on a standard daily lower band ride, and I used a previous instance from September as an example. Interestingly the path then taken by this band ride was similar to that last example, with the daily candle on Monday punching down through the 3sd lower band and then closing back above it, also generating a bullish daily high volume spike, then the daily candle on Tuesday being an inside day trading part of intraday back over the daily lower band, then the daily candle on Wednesday opening an closing back above the daily middle band.

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Strong Daily Lower Band Rides

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The type of very strong daily lower band ride that I was describing on Friday turned out to be exactly what we saw, so I’m taking a moment to look at that this morning as these happen on a regular basis, two to four times a year or so, and tend to behave in a very characteristic way.

Looking at the SPX daily chart below, with just the two and three standard deviation bands marked, you can see how the body of the daily candle for the last two days is roughly under the 2sd daily lower band. That is normal, though a little misleading as I was noting on Friday that these often find resistance very close to the daily lower band. It looks from the chart as though the high on Friday was well above the 2sd lower band, but that’s because the 2sd lower band declined from 4492 at the time of the high of the day, with that high just above at 4494, into 4468 at the close.

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Taking Stock

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In my post on Friday 6th August last year I was looking at a possible backtest scenario on SPX that could be setting up and I reviewed how that is looking on my first post this year, as I was thinking, and am still thinking, that backtest may well be delivered over the next few weeks.

That backtest would be of a huge resistance trendline on SPX that broke at the end of 2020 / start of 2021, and is currently in the 3850 – 3900 area. The break over that trendline may have been a break up over a rising megaphone resistance trendline with a target in the mid 6000s on SPX , but if that is the case, to confirm that target, the trendline would need to be backtested and hold into new all time highs on SPX.

Obviously the strength of this decline so far in January has surprised most, so I’d like today to review what the decline so far is telling us, and to talk about the monthly SPX chart.

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So Far So Good

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In my last post I was talking about an SPX target in the 4500 area as long as SPX stayed under the daily middle band. Since then we saw a short lived break above the daily middle band but SPX failed to convert that back to support and has delivered a new retracement low today.

I would note the open daily RSI 14 sell signal that I am expecting to reach at least the possible near miss target at 34-6 on the RSI 14 by the end of this move.

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