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.

Update on Q4 Pivot View for Stocks and Gold

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Reference a post from August 11: Potential Pivots Upcoming for Stocks and Gold

Stock Market Status

In the above-linked article we noted several legs that could be kicked out from under the S&P 500’s table in Q4 2017. The stock market blew right through one of them, which was a bearish (on average) seasonal trend for the 2nd half of September. No one indicator is a be all, end all. In sum, they define probabilities. But price is the ultimate arbiter and as of today, price says ‘still bullish’ (says Captain Obvious).

Another leg was the 30 month cycle that has caught 5 of 7 important tops or bottoms (4 tops, 1 bottom) since 2000. As noted when it was first presented, this monthly chart takes into account months of slush in and around the 30 month mark, so it is far from an exact timer. The S&P 500 remains in the window with the September bar now in play. (more…)

The Magnificent Seven

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I trade a couple of different portfolios, and today I thought I’d talk about the smaller one, in which I trade principally options. To be clear, I am not at all a sophisticated options trader. I simply buy puts that tend to have three characteristics: (a) in-the-money (b) plenty of time until expiration – – three, four, or five months out (c) are against securities that look well-positioned to fall and have also illustrated their ability in the past to fall hard.

Here are the seven positions in this portfolio – – first up is XOP, the S&P oil and gas producers, which as you can see from SlopeCharts has a history of forming tops and tumbling.

slopechart_XOP

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Gold in Three Time Frames

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Please don’t listen to the “gold smack down” cry babies, always making rationalizations or excuses, I beg of you. Don’t listen to the “gold is nothing but a stupid rock they dig out of the ground” neo hipster wise guys either. Gold just is, and the gold bug “community” makes way more of it than that, taking it to the realm of the mystical or worse, religious (as in a war of good vs. evil).

The wise guys wish gold did not exist (but it is) because it gets in the way of so many paper and digital advances and innovations (or shenanigans), not to mention boundless egghead theories about a new era of finance. Get this wise guys; we are still, each of us, bags of bones, blood and guts in some cases with high functioning brains that tend to forget that fact. We are emotional beings; humans. Gold has provided stability to emotions in the financial realm for centuries.

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The Buffoon Indicator

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A couple of weeks ago, in a rare moment of self-awareness, I wrote a post called Bullion Buffoon, in which I mentioned my nearly Gartman-like levels of bad timing with respect to bullion, and that…….

This is on my mind for obvious reasons – – gold has been steadily ascending lately. It’s had a good 2017 in general, but the North Korea situation has been particularly good to it, prompting me to have that “I should buy gold” feeling.

The correct conclusion, of course, was that since I was getting that special itch, gold had probably topped for the moment. Of course,I had to overthink the situation and declare that since I was NOT acting on that feeling, then gold would keep going up (e.g. “woe is me”). One is reminded of the scene in Princess Bride and the poison dilemma.

In any case, my bullion buffoon indicator was almost spot-on, as we can see:

0921-gc

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