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.

Greek Fires

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The Greek Parliament passed the austerity measures required for the Eurozone rescue yesterday night, and the spontaneous street celebrations in Athens are showing that, for the moment at least, the greek public seem to be solidly behind the deal, even if those celebrations seem a little over-exuberant by non-mediterranean standards. It's reassuring to see however that the greeks are united, as they undertake a program of austerity and reform which might well prove overambitious for a more weak and divided nation:

  120213 Athens Burning

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Inflection Point (by Springheel Jack)

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As I mentioned yesterday the negative divergences have been building over the last few days and it appears that at the time of writing, equities are likely to gap down heavily on reports that the Greek deal is falling apart. I'm surprised by the Greek news I have to say, I was expecting it to last at least a week or two after being finalised, though against that, the deal is so obviously against the best interests of Greece, and has so much resistance to it there, that perhaps this is not such a surprising development after all.

Quite a few interesting charts this morning and I'll lead with a chart showing the daily bollinger bands on SPX, NDX and RUT. You can see how these indices have been walking the upper bollinger band upwards during this amazingly strong move, and if we are to see a retracement here, which seems likely, the obvious targets are the middle bollinger band in the 1320-5 area on SPX, with some strong support in the 1333 area, and rising channel support (marked) on NDX and RUT:

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Bearskin Rugs (by Springheel Jack)

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I was joking on twitter yesterday morning that the short-term bearish setup I was looking at looked very tempting, even if people were having to climb over piles of bearskin rugs to get to the screens to see it. Needless to say there was a report early in the day that the Greek are very close to finalising their no-default default, and both EURUSD and ES broke up hard to trash that bearish setup. This market remains in a strong uptrend and JBTFD is still the order of the day.

It still looks early to think about a top on EURUSD and GBPUSD at the moment. I've been posting my big picture USD chart and the obvious target is a hit above 76.72 in mid to late February. I can't see any reason to doubt at the moment that we will see that level hit, and at that point we will see if that rising channel on USD can hold:

120208 USD Daily Possible IHS Forming

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Bullish Break (by Springheel Jack)

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SPX broke decisively above declining resistance on Friday, which has eliminated one of the last bearish options on the table from the low in October. There are two main options remaining. The first is that SPX makes a double-top at the 2011 high. That is a very strong resistance level as it was also the base for the 2007 double-top. The second, which would fit with a retest of broken rising support from March 2009, would be a higher high as the end of wave 5 from that 2009 low. As wave 3 cannot be the shortest wave, that would have to finish below 1434.44. Above 1434.44 the path is clear to a retest of the 2007 highs.

Obviously there may well be no bearish resolution here, and given how far this current wave up has come since the December 19th low, any reversal in the near future may just be a retracement of this current move before new highs. With NDX at 11 year highs, and Dow beating the 2011 high on Friday, this is certainly looking pretty bullish at the moment:

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