SPX broke back above the daily lower band yesterday and delivered a 27 point bounce from the lows, before giving much of that back overnight. There are arguments both ways for direction today. The arguments for the short side are that the 60min RSI 14 reached 50, which is a natural reversal level and the obvious level to reverse at to deliver positive RSI divergence at a retest of the lows. The falling channel on RUT also argues for a test of the lows next. I have two bull/bear levels that I’ll be watching today carefully in regular trading hours (RTH) and those are the 1925 ES level (1930 SPX area) at the ES 50 hour MA, and the SPX daily lower band at 1934. (more…)
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.
Other Markets Update
This is my vacation post for other (non-equities) markets. For equities check my last post from earlier today. Normal service resumes next Monday 4th August.
Last time I was looking at EURUSD I said that I was expecting a test of rising wedge support in the 1.35 area. EURUSD made that and then slightly lower to test the 200 DMA, so the rising wedge is now broken. Unless we see a fairly fast recovery to new highs I’m now looking at targets for EURUSD in the mid-120s. I’ve been watching this setup for months in the expectation that there should be a strong USD rally at the end of QE3 so I’m expecting this to resolve down. EURUSD weekly chart:
Interest Rate Break
Here on Slope, we’ve been watching $TNX and TLT for quite some time, waiting for a definitive move. Interest rates have been inching down lately, and if it breaks that horizontal, I think we can finally rest assured that rates are going to be firmly moving lower for a while.
Canada’s Inflation Rate Increased to 2.4%…Trend or Anomaly?
Canada’s inflation rate continued to rise from 2.3% in May to 2.4% in June, as reported today by Statistics Canada.
Is this the continuation of a longer-term trend, or simply temporary? Time will tell.
Dial M for Murder
There was an interesting comment made to me yesterday that the shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines flight over Ukraine helped the bears considerably, and that’s true, up to a point. It is something I have noticed regularly before at big inflection points, and it’s obviously not the case that the patterns can somehow see into the future. I think there is a relationship there but logically it must be that if there is a strong bear setup like this, then the right news trigger will set the ball rolling with an apparent reaction to the news that is disproportionately larger than the reaction you might see to similar news at other times. We’ve all seen the markets shrug off bad news many times before, but when there are decent bear setups in play the market is showing a willingness to reverse that any bad news can then set strongly in motion.
Obviously the investigation into the extent that Moscow was responsible for this very avoidable tragedy is just getting started, and we may well see more geopolitical shockwaves from this in current days, though it’s important to keep this in proportion. No war is likely to start due to this tragedy, and it’s even possible that it may act as a catalyst to end the current Russian insurgency in Ukraine. (more…)
