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.

Evening Indexes

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What a strange, strange market we are in. One would think the market would be getting pounded on a daily basis, but just the opposite is happening lifetime highs every single day except for weekends. I am delighted to state that my shorts are holding own beautifully in the face of this, which actually makes a certain amount of sense since the breadth of the market is awful.

The tech stocks just keep muscling to lifetime highs, and the absolute tidal wave of earnings that we’re going to see on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings will either justify these valuations or, at long last, start to punch these prices in the nose.

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In the Mix

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Heading into the weekend, it seemed the big question was how peace talks would go. By Saturday, it was clear that they weren’t even going to take place, which in saner times would have meant a total wipe-out on Monday (that is to say, today).

In fairness, there WAS a gap down on Sunday when the futures opened, albeit a modest one, and even then, the market bottomed within minutes before dusting itself off and moving to LIFETIME HIGHS on the /ES, the /NQ, the /RTY, and any other index you might care to mention.

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The Republic of Itsnosobad

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Happy Friday, everyone. And, as is the tradition on Fridays, the press is in a flurry about peace talks, people flying from here to there, and the possibility that such-and-so will meet with this-and-such.

Look, everyone, it took twenty-one MONTHS for the least nuclear deal to be hammered out over a decade ago, and that was with exceptionally talented parties who were eager to meet steadfastly. This situation is – – different.

In spite of this, the VIX has been steady as a rock all week, trading at pretty much 20.75 more or less a few cents.

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The Four Horsemen

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Cotton, Wheat, Corn and Soybeans

There were four big setups, each covering multiple tickers, that I was looking in my bi-weekly The Bigger Picture webinars last year and at the start of this year that looked very strong, but I was struggling to come up with any decent fundamental reasons why they might play out.

That changed when the US attacked Iran on 28th February, and since then I have been looking at these four big setups as follows:

War – I looked at the oil setups in my posts on 3rd and 13th March. Those setups have made the first targets but haven’t yet made the extension targets at retests of the 2022 highs on $BRENT, $WTIC and $GASO.

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Schrodinger’s Strait

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In my post on Tuesday 31st March I was saying that the likely best thing that could happen in the Iran War was that the US declares victory and that the war has ended regardless of any input from Iran. This would avoid further escalation and the major economic shock to the world economy that would likely result from longer term disruption to the Strait of Hormuz and likely also the Bab El-Mandeb Strait.

In my post on Wednesday 8th April after Trump declared a ceasefire and accepted talks on the basis of Iran’s ten point plan I posted charts showing bottoming patterns on SPX, QQQ, DIA and IWM that had broken up and those all made their targets last week, with new all time highs on SPX, QQQ and IWM on the back of a ceasefire in Lebanon and numerous statements last week suggesting that a peace deal was close.

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