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.

Tim’s Chicken Scratch Returns

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Even occasional readers are acquainted with my near-obsession over the gold miners ETF symbol GDX. I have been closely following an analog I discovered for GDX, and last week I printed it out, took pencil in hand, and clumsily scratched out what seems to be the turning points of the analog.

Below is the 2007-2008 timeframe. Please note these letters have no special meaning, except to order and identify the turning points. For the love of God, don't mistake this for some kind of attempt at Elliott Wave (cough, cough).

0130-GDXOne

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Opex Seasonality (by Trade Flight Plan)

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Happy New Year! It may not be Open Season, but we are approaching January Opex Season. We bring you another episode in our fun game of Math-You-Won’t-Find-Anywhere-Else, only this time it’s Opex Seasonality.

We compiled data from our Personal Trading Almanac to build a profile of how the major indexes perform on average each options expiration week. The data goes back 22 years and sniffs out the opex week price action from more than 5,500 data points.

What’s interesting is that January Opex has one of the few bearish opex week tendencies of the year. Over the past 22 years, the S&P 500s closed opex week in negative territory 63% of the time. Of course, this year can very well be different. Employment is stabilizing, the markets are shrugging off Euro debt zones, and it’s an election year. But for those about to short, stay thirsty my friends…

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An Interesting Spreadsheet

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In prior posts, I've mentioned the interesting comparison of the $HUI gold index between 2006-2008 and the past couple of years. Below is the grid chart showing the past behavior on top and the recent behavior on the bottom. The analog speaks for itself.

0104-hui

Instead of just eyeballing the charts, I entered the dates into a spreadsheet of the difference in time between the major turning points. The length of time is quite similar, although the present instance is just a little shorter (95.5% of the length) that the prior one.

The interesting thing is calculating what this adjusted delta yields in terms of a "start date" for a breakdown in the pattern. The date turns out to be January 21st (a Saturday, but hey, it's just an estimate).

0105-dates

Can we count on some kind of hard fall starting then? Of course not. But at least it pinpoints a day for this analog to see if some kind of breakdown does indeed occur around then.