Slope of Hope with Tim Knight

Making the Move

I am going to be pointing www.slopeofhope.com to my new blog platform starting, oh, about now. This takes a little while to propagate, so sorry for any confusion. I'll be doing a post for today soon on the new site.

Low End of Range or New Hope?

Well, now that day after day after day of bad economic news has consistently rained down on the market, finally the markets are moving down in a meaningful way. It's about time.

But looking at the chart, it's hard to say what happens next. Is this simply yet another move to the lower end of the range, or are we positioning ourselves to begin breaking down again and start partying hard once more?

Being a bit of a wimp, I've closed out 75% of my index positions at great profits and now am holding on to a small $RUT put (and, as usual, my bajillion equity puts).

As for the new blog platform, I still have to read the comments, but I am planing to formally move slopeofhope.com to the NEW site this evening. We'll see if that happens or not. If it does, I'll stop yapping about new versus old and will simply focus on continuing my posts as normal. Thanks!

Sneak Threak

OK, I'm getting closer and closer to "jumping ship" to the new blog platform.

Please check out today's post.

COGs

Good morning. Here's one opportunity you might consider - - COG seems badly stretched to the upside. Not a wildly bearish pattern, certainly, but you might make some green on any deflation in the energy madness. I'm buying a few puts myself this morning.

Another very different COG is shown below - one of my favorite commercials of all time. It's got a fascinating history. Enjoy!

Tiresome

The market continues to bobble aimlessly. When I took off on a plane today, bound for Utah, the Dow was up 50. When I landed 90 minutes later, I was relieved to see it was down 20. I was afraid of another triple-digit up day in the face of yet more terrible economic news. The market's positive reactions to bad economic news is disconcerting. But I guess people want to think that dropping interest rates, as Bernanke keeps hinting he will do, is going to solve all our problems. I doubt it. The wall seems to be holding.

The Dow 30 pushed up against its broken trendline and, bless its heart, the trendline pushed the prices back down. Hold that line! Hold that line!

Looking at the daily graph of the Dow 30, we can see that the 50 and 100 day moving averages have plunged beneath the 200 day moving average, and the price is beneath all three. The price has managed to retrace back to the 50 day moving average, and I hope this is a turning point. I'm getting a little sick of waiting.

What's scary to me is this: it would make sense for the market to fall now. Every chart I look at tells me the same thing: "the rise is over! the market is going to fall now!" But the market loves to make fools out of people, particularly when things should behave this way or that. so - - paradoxical as it might seem - - I am concerned that things are so well poised for a fall now. Sad, isn't it?

And, in the background of all of this, the U.S. dollar continues to move toward the value of toilet paper.

On to some individual issues.........I bought puts on APOL again today. I did this profitably last week, and I'm jumping in again. I like this broken trendline and today's retracement.

I'm sorry to keep showing ATI, but I am madly in love with this chart. I have a ton of puts on this.

I got knocked out of JNPR, but once the prices got close to its trendline, I re-entered. It is interesting to me that today's high price was just one penny below that gap that took place just before the trendline break.

I've still got a lot of energy puts, including a big put position on OIH. With oil sky-high, this has been a tough hold, but hope springs eternal in the bearish breast.

A couple of specific energy puts I've got including SLB, whose price/volume divergence only strengthens my faith in this position.

And Exxon Mobil (XOM) which has done a terrific retracement to its broken trendline.

That's it for tonight. I'm heading back to the airport to go home. See you Thursday, and thanks, as always, for swinging by.

Another Sneak Peek

Work continues on the new blog platform (which I am showing off here in Utah to some colleagues today). A few improvements include:

• Clicking the Performance information shows the detail trades which constitute that performance
• I've got all the "Pages" up on the new site
• A lot of general cleanup, including a tidier portfolio

Many more improvements are coming (although admittedly most of the goodies are intended for the authors, not the audience).

Anyway, I've done another short post on the new site, and I'll be doing my real post on today's really interesting action later today, once I'm done with my meetings. Thanks!

On the Road

Where the Bodies Are

Danger Zone

There was a huge amount of bad economic news this morning (high inflation, crummy housing, plunging consumer confidence), and the market is surging higher. This is not good news for bears, folks. A market which moves up on bad news is, for us, a bad thing.

We are approaching a real danger zone. Should the $SPX crossed above 1396.02, the bearish case is going to take another hit. By the way, I am super busy and am not hanging out in the comments section, so I apologize for my absence.

Totally Missed GOOG

Wow, I missed a nice opportunity on GOOG.

I follow this stock, like everyone else does, but I'm sort of GOOG-phobic, having been burned on it many times in the past.

So I remained simply an interested bystander. The fact is that GOOG broken an important trendline (circled area), fell, and then retraced beautifully (tinted area).

The tinted area below shows how nicely it has fallen since the retracement - nearly 100 points. That's a lot of juice! Oh, well. As a trader, you have to live with lots of big fish that get away.