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.

Push Up or Shut Up

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I’m a reversals specialist, and on a multi-timeframe basis I chart trendline, pattern and RSI reversal setups that work well. I’m good at what I do. However on an intraday basis the first question of the day is always whether it might be a trend day. On a trend day all reversal setups become worthless, bearish patterns deliver tiny declines if they deliver at all, every counter-trend reversal setup, however good on other days, stops working, and there will generally be no setups in the direction of the trend because the retracements are too small to form them. That is the power of a strong trend.

On larger timescales these trends can last months or even years, and while in the grip of these strong impulse waves my smaller reversal setups and intraday reversal setups work just fine, as they are too small relative to the trend to be strongly affected. However I then get the same problem with my daily, 60min and 15min charts as I get with my intraday charts on trend days. Time after time very nice reversal setups will setup and the trend steamroller will squash them flat. A strong impulse wave up will roll straight over anything in its path until it ends, and must be respected. (more…)

Four Grumpy Bears

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Well Monday was all set up for the bears, and they blew it. Yesterday was all set up for the bulls, and they blew it too. Of the two the bulls blew it worse in my view, and I’m going to review the very nice topping setups here on all four of the main US indices that I follow.

The first two are SPX and Dow, and on these two there are remarkably similar sequences of three nested double-tops with ultimate downside targets at tests of the broken 2007 highs.

On SPX the first thing to mention is very strong support at 1864, with both the daily middle band and the 50 DMA at 1864 at the close yesterday. If that should break then the first and smallest double-top support level is at the 1850 low. A break below that should be the start of a slide down this series of increasingly large double-tops down to a target in the 1578 area, effectively to retest broken resistance at the 2007 high. That might not all play out of course, but I did mention this target as possibility last summer as it is the obvious technical target for a big retracement here to set up the next big move up. SPX daily chart: (more…)

Games with Frontiers

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‘A quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing’
Neville Chamberlain, PM of Great Britain, talking about Czechoslovakia in 1938

Back in 1963 there was an significant milestone in the transition to modern warfare when the the name of the British Ministry of War was changed to the Ministry of Defence. Many other euphemisms about war have been used since then with ‘police actions’, ‘military advisers’ and many others becoming common.

At the same time the absurd situation arose, as the age of empires passed away and the British Empire was dismantled, that the only two remaining true empires, based in Russia and China, posed as anti-imperial powers, with the pejorative description ‘imperialist’ mainly applied by them to Western Powers who had already lost or given away their foreign territories. (more…)