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.

Counting on Crude

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Friday, Monday, Tuesday – all great days. I must be dreaming! As of last Wednesday, I was ready to jump off the nearest bridge, since the market just kept pushing higher, irrespective of news or any kind of information. How quickly things change.

Wednesday is a big deal, of course, since it’s one of the four “big” FOMC meetings. My most fervent wish (as you listening, God?) is for Yellen to do her thing, and the market (after its usual spasm) starts falling hard, realizing that the old coot is, at the end, powerless to hold back reality in perpetuity. That day, of course, will eventually come, but I’m sick of waiting for “eventually”. We need that “Emperor Has No Clothes” moment, even if it is a century-old dwarf she-male who wasn’t even physically attractive in her twenties.

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Cheering Crude’s Collapse

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OK, OK, it isn’t a “collapse”, but I like alliteration, and I needed a “C” word. Suffice it to say that I’m pleased crude has been weakening since twice hitting the +$50 mark.

0601-crude

Incidentally, Bernie Sanders is going to be here in Palo Alto today, and I’ll be going to the rally. I’ pretty excited about it. Bernie is, of course, the only moral person running for President. I firmly support him, and I would zealously applaud confiscatory taxes on all people except for financial bloggers, who I think should be given special dispensation given their marvelous contribution to society. Feel the Bern!

A Focus on Energy

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What I had planned on doing this afternoon was a post of about a dozen terrific energy-related stocks that are good short candidates, but ProphetCharts is almost unusable at the moment. I only managed to get one chart out of it before it stopped fetching them. I sometimes feel like I’ve allowed my child to be adopted, and when I run into the youngster a few years later, it’s become a juvenile delinquent. Sad.

Anyway, the one chart I managed to fetch before ProphetCharts starting puking all over its data servers was Energen, shown below. It’s very typical of energy stocks these days:

(a) a former smooth run-up;
(b) a clean series of lower highs, separated by violent V-shaped recoveries
(c) its current price is, shall we say, lofty in relation to its history as a whole.

0526-egn

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