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 Will It Take?

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North Korea loudly proclaimed it was making a nuclear weapon to be fired at the United States. The largest company on the planet has lost one-third of its market value, destroying hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth in the span of a few months. And, based on this, the market on a number of measures reached the highest levels ever in world history.

Well, Apple has been talked to death, and frankly, I think in the weeks ahead, people are going to realize it's basically a company past its prime and not really worth yacking about. No one has given me a medal (or a chest to pin it on) for my oh-so-right prediction about Apple, but I'll say what I've said before: you will never see this stock again at $700, and you can expect it to fart around in the 400s (and, occasionally, lower 500s) in the months ahead. As the chart shows below, we are close to major support, and a retard-o-bounce is a strong possibility.

0124-finalAAPL

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The Astonishing Small Caps

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If there's one chart that illustrates the strangehold the bulls have on the bears, it's the one below. The Russell 2000 is at a never-before-seen-in-history high. Higher than the NASDAQ bubble. Higher than the housing/credit bubble. Never. Ever. Higher.

I had hoped that the break of the extraordinary wedge pattern (highlighted in teal) would be similar in follow-up to what happened with the prior instance that I've shaded in green. Instead, the fall terminated abruptedly on October 4, 2011 and has been more or less pushing higher ever since.

0115-rut

Central Bankers: 183. Bears: 0.

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I am seriously starting to lose hope we're going to see a bear market ever again in our lifetimes. If central bankers can simply press a computer button and push the market perpetually higher, what's the point?

The ONLY bear market right now, it seems to me, is in bonds. The "clean setup" I pointed out yesterday is working out, and I'm augmenting my long position in TBT, the ultra-bear fund for bonds. Here's the ZB as it tumbles away:

0907-zb