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 Edge

By -

If you had asked me a week ago what I thought the probability was that we’d resume the downtrend and take out the lows of early February, I would have probably said 80%. Last week’s action (augmented by this morning’s) takes that down to more like 20%. It seems that, once again, the BTFD crowd was right. It sucks.

Oddly, the big tumble early in this month took place on pretty much no distinguishable news, and the same can be said for the recent lift. Let’s face it, the Dow has gone up thousands of points in just a couple of weeks, and no one can point to any real reason why. It’s pretty much like the “V-dip” didn’t need to take place at all (except to wipe out the unfortunates who owned XIV). (more…)

True Believer Syndrome

By -

I’m going to start with a tale from about 180 years ago. In the early 1840s, a religious leader named William Miller believed the second coming of Jesus was foretold in the Bible with mathematical accuracy, and using a myriad of verses and tidbits from the Bible, he sought to compute as closely as possible when exactly J.C. was going to come back.

prophetcy

At first, he didn’t offer anything very exact:

Using an interpretive principle known as the day-year principle, Miller, along with others, interpreted a prophetic “day” to read not as a 24-hour period, but rather as a calendar year. Miller became convinced that the 2,300-day period started in 457 B.C. with the decree to rebuild Jerusalem by Artaxerxes I of Persia. His interpretation led him to believe and promote the year 1843. Despite the urging of his supporters, Miller never announced an exact date for the expected Second Advent. But he did narrow the time period to sometime in the Jewish year 5604, stating: “My principles in brief, are, that Jesus Christ will come again to this earth, cleanse, purify, and take possession of the same, with all the saints, sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844.” (more…)

Letting Go

By -

There’s an old saying about how the opposite of love isn’t hate………it’s apathy. I guess there’s some truth to that. I’m definitely feeling it now with respect to the equity “markets”. Years ago, I was madly in love with them. These days, it’s the opposite. But I’m not feeling angry. I’m feeling more like this.

Recent trading has kinda pissed me off. On the last day of the year, there was a false bullish breakout (left green tint) followed by a hard break of the triangle (magenta). So far, so good. But in the first trading day of 2018, the ES pushed right back into the triangle pattern and, bang, above it again. I’m typing this on Tuesday evening, so who knows what it’ll be doing by the time you read this. But as I sit here now, I tell ya, it’s a pisser.

estw

(more…)