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.

Wild Thing (by Springheel Jack)

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Well that was a very wild recovery at the end of yesterday's strange trading day. I had a good day mainly as I took off my long hedges at 1075.25 in the morning and then put them back on at 1115.25 shortly before the close. Against that my late day scalp long at 1073.5 that I cashed for 1.25 points obviously left over 40 points on the table.

There was a lot of news yesterday.  Moody's three-level downgrade of Italy caused surprisingly little trouble. The announcement of possible plans to shore up Euro-area banks was credited with causing the late day moonshot.

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Big Bad Bond Bear

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I am really, really pleased with how I handled my portfolio today.

Did I make a ton of money? No, not at all. The percentage change was so close to zero we might as well call it zero. The good thing is that I covered most of my shorts at good profits and went long the Euro and shorted the Bond (via TLT) at good prices. So the fact I didn't lose a bunch of money is more important to me today, since repositioning can sometimes be a very costly exercise.

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Looking Lower (by Springheel Jack)

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NOTE: I neglected to put up this post, which Jack wrote five hours ago; definitely an oversight on my part; my apologies!! – Tim

I was watching for one of the last bear market indicators to trigger at the close last week, and that was a close below the monthly 20 SMA on SPX. SPX closed a long way below this and the history of the last two bull markets suggests that we can expect no more than a retest of this trendline before the next cyclical bull market has begun. I've added the bollinger bands to this chart as a touch of the lower monthly bollinger band would generally be a minimum bear market target and so it's worth noting therefore that the lower bollinger band is currently in the 1000 area:

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End of Quarter Tomorrow (by Springheel Jack)

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Just a quick post today as I've been overdoing it a bit since I returned from vacation and I'm feeling a bit washed out. The trendline setup today looks pretty simple today in any case. As I said yesterday morning, the ES rising channel breach and retest looked bearish unless ES broke back up into the channel and we duly had a down day on SPX. A declining channel has since formed since the high this week and immediate resistance is at the broken 1162.75 level (ES). That has been tested and the declining channel established at the overnight high. If 1162.75 resistance and the declining channel hold today then the outlook is still bearish with declining channel support in the 1125-30 area today. If we see a break up through the declining channel and 1162.75 then the outlook will turn bullish and we might see a significant rally today. Here's the setup on the ES 15min:

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