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.

Some Candles Are Just Too Rare

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That was a very rare daily candle yesterday, not visible on SPX, because for some reason the SPX data feed doesn’t seem to notice gaps much for reasons I have tried and failed to establish in the past, but on SPY, which is what I use when I want a true picture of the daily candle. The candle for the day was a strong gap down through the daily middle band, with a recovery back above it, and I was only able to find three comparable candles going back to 1991.

In those three instances two traded intraday below the middle band the next day and both closed red for the day, with one closing significantly below the middle band. The other example rose modestly the next day. What was interesting though was what happened afterwards, which was that in all three instances SPX then rose to touch the upper band on SPY (a little short in two instances on SPX), and then immediately retraced back to the lower band. That was very interesting though a total sample size of three is very small and yesterday’s gap under the middle band was the deepest of them all so even those three aren’t necessarily fully comparable. . (more…)

The Day Before

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I don’t know how long it will last, but yesterday was recognisably the second day of a band ride on the SPX daily upper band. ES looks as though SPX should open near the upper band,so whichever way it goes, this should be a third day for that band ride. There may be no more than that as quite a few band rides fail after the third day. If SPX has a strong day then I’d expect the upper band to close in the 1981-3 range today. SPX daily chart:

140703 SPX Daily Rising Wedge Mas BBs

(more…)

Q3 Day 1 – Bullish

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The first trading day of the third quarter is historically bullish. The Stock Trader’s Almanac has this as down as 76.2% bullish on Dow and 81% bullish on SPX. Looking back over the last ten years the points to note are:

– Eight green closes and two red closes
– The two red closes were -3 (2010) and -12 (2004)
– The eight green closes were +3, +3, +4, +5, +8, +10, +16, +19
– The second day of Q3 leans bearish

I’m leaning bullish today and looking for a retest of the 1968 SPX high from last week. If strong primary resistance overhead is respected there is still headroom to run up as high as the SPX daily upper band, currently at 1972. SPX daily chart: (more…)