I've been stuck at about 4,600 Twitter followers for a long time. I'd love to nudge this past the 5,000 mark. For any of you that have a Twitter account, follow me! I won't bombard you with nonsense. I usually just tweet when an important post is up or I have something pithy to say. Thanks!
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.
More Improvements to Comments System
As most of you know, Slope of Hope has its own customized comments system (whose development was funded through the advertisements displayed on the site). There are a few recent improvements that I'd like you to know about:
Cleaner Tool Bar
The tool bar has always been there, but after the umpteenth person asked me to add a Search function to the comments system (which has been there for a while), I decided to make it a little more obvious. Also, there's a new link – "Shares" – which I'll discuss in a moment.
Top Shared Items
There are four kinds of "comments" you can add – (1) a comment (2) a trading idea, either long or short (3) a link to something of interest (4) a chart. The comments system tracks the most popular links (that is, type #3 which Slopers have posted) and lets you see an organized list of the most popular items. I guess the current top link isn't too much of a shock.
Better Searching
There are a couple of improvements to search. First, the results are now returned in reverse chronological order. Second, you can now click on a user's name and get just the results for your search from that one particular individual. For instance, in the dialog below, a search for the word "absurd" yields some results. Let's say I just wanted to see instances of this in which just Goatmug used this word. I would click on his username:
…..and, voila……
Tweetable Comments
This is probably the coolest new feature of all – for those of you using Twitter, you can now Tweet a specific comment to all your followers. In other words, they will be provided a link which will zip right down to the specific comment. Just click the new Tweet button. Cool stuff, eh?
By the way, if you have your own blog and you like this comment system, you can get it for free. Anyway, I hope you enjoy these new features. We have the most active community of any financial blog, and I think it's getting better all the time!
Comments System Improvements
Hello Slopers,
First off – it's that time of year again. I'll be spending a glorious week at Fallen Leaf Lake, thus the blog's pace will be less frenetic than normal. It'll still be fifty times more interesting and active than 99% of the finance blogs out there, but Slope has its own reputation to uphold, so I offer you my annual apology.
Most of you are aware that Slope has a very active comments section. You can read about the basics here, learn about joining comments, and also read about the most recent features.
I have paid for the development of the comments system completely out of my own pocket (aided, in part, to your abiding interest in the advertisements on the site) and I wanted to add a few new features to it. The most important thing I want to change is the ranking system for trading performance. It is fairly well-known among frequent Slopers that the data is 15-minute delayed, and I've got a pretty strong hunch that a lot of the best performers are, shall we say, gaming the system. It's all too easy to see a stock make a big change, enter a Short or Long on it, and then close it out profitably a little later in the day.
I am therefore going to eliminate "day-trading" as part of the performance grading and only use data for trades lasting more than a day. I apologize to the awesome day traders out there who seriously are doing well, but I think the risk of a "gamed" system really diminishes the value of the leader board.
Anyway, I'm not bringing this up to talk about that – – I want to hear your ideas. What improvements would you like to see in comments, or on Slope in general? Now's your time to voice your opinion, since I'm putting together a to-do list right now.
Thanks, and I hope you are having a relaxing weekend! I certainly am.
Oh, Those Fickle Slopers….
You guys just kill me. Seriously.
If the market goes up one or two days:
+ All the bears vanish (your host notwithstanding);
+ The guys who love to be bulls get really loud about it;
+ The Hun shows up.
Just two days ago, everyone was convinced – absolutely convinced – the S&P was heading toward 1400 or 1450. Nonsense. The bull run ended in April, and the bears are back in control.
Just as the bears could only get two or three days of relief during the Bernanke-fueled fraud-rally, now the bulls get a taste of their own medicine.
While the market was lurching higher, and all of you were panicking, I made my Come to Papa post and put this at the top of the comments section:
"The speed with which some Slopers become scaredy-cats requires high-end scientific instruments on days like this. Incredible. "
There was even talk of "smart floor traders" (ha!) talking about 1650 on the S&P this year. Jesus, guys. What's with you?!?!?
This is not to say it's a free-fall down to zero. God knows I wish it were, since that would be glorious fun, but there are going to be fits and starts. I have been very, very light until yesterday, and thank goodness, because I side-stepped almost all of that fraud-strength. But, as I made clear yesterday, I am short 75 (out of 200 targeted) positions.
Now, as I've also made clear, some stocks seemed ready for a bounce, and I am long 16 stocks now, and I imagine at the opening bell I will wish I had 16 fewer longs than I do right now. Such is the price to pay for uncertainty.
My point isn't that the market is now going into a free-fall. As I'm typing this, we might be seeing the lows of the day – who knows? But just as Bin Laden's capture marked a top, the Bernanke ego-stroking-fest yesterday might also mark a small top, and the cold fact is that out of the 1000+ stocks I look at each day, maybe 10 of them look like good longs. There are a ton of delicious-looking shorts out there, and my view is that, starting on May 1, the torch was passed to the good guys.
Downward Pressure on Oil (by Mike Paulenoff)
Frankly, there are so many cross-currents influencing the markets at any given time, uncertainty clearly has the upper hand — even when we think that new information or decisions are alleviating some of the uncertainty.
Case in point: crude oil prices. Is downward pressure positive for equities (for obvious reasons: i.e., the consumer gets a "tax cut"), or negative because it might reflect a serious slow down in U.S. and global economic growth (read: China demand)?
I don't know the answer, but I am leaning towards the latter scenario right now.
Looking at the nearby NYMEX crude oil futures chart we see that prices continue to follow their technical script, which called for a breakdown from the four-week coil pattern towards an optimal target zone of 90.00-88.00.
So far, the plunge from the coil has hit a confirmed low of 92.12 earlier this morning. Barring a sustained climb above 97.25, my pattern and momentum work will continue to point to 90.00-88.00.
Whether or not downward pressure on NYMEX oil (and to a lesser extent Brent) will translate into headwinds for Exxon (XOM), Schlumberger (SLB), ConocoPhillips (COP), Halliburton (HAL), Chevron (CVX) and the ProShares UltraShort Oil & Gas ETF (DUG) remains to be seen.
That said, with the possible exception of CVX, all of the above-mentioned energy names exhibit very toppy intermediate-term chart patterns.
Originally published on MPTrader.com.
