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.

Gold is Still Getting Fixed

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Hey look, what better place and time to be posting gold-bullish articles?  😉

So there was a panicky spike in gold last summer as the herd sought refuge from the euro, which was falling apart as some of its components had a really hard time peddling their legacy of debt.

This was going to be the big one as gold was finally going to blast off, better get aboard!  You are a gold bug now and you are safe!  No, unfortunately the new players were just being introduced to the overdone euphoria of the upside thrills, only to later be introduced to the bile of the inevitable downward reactions.

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China’s Manufacturing PMI is a Mystery

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Will the correct Chinese Manufacturing Data please present itself? As shown on the graphs below, two data releases made on March 31st show widely differing results even though the first one (CFLP Manufacturing PMI) mentions that it's "tightly correlated" with HSBC Manufacturing PMI.

Perhaps Asian market reaction Monday morning will shed some light as to which one is correct.

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Mixed Signals Overnight (by Springheel Jack)

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The immediate picture was looking distinctly bullish at the open of the overnight session, with a sloping IHS breaking up on ES, bonds looking bearish and EURUSD seemingly poised to break up. Some of that bullish picture is intact, but ES retraced to trash the IHS and break initial rising support, so the overall picture is in doubt. ES has established a rising channel from last Thursday's low at the overnight low so far and as long as that channel holds I'm leaning bullish, with a break over declining resistance at 1408.75 needed to confirm that the short term trend is still up. On a move below channel support at 1401.5 I would lean bearish and see where that goes today, with a break below Friday's low at 1395.75 opening up a test of Thursday's low in the 1386 area:

On the SPX 15min chart I have a provisional rising channel established from the March 7 low at Thursday's low, and a break below that would look bearish. I have that support in the 1397 SPX area. One interesting thing to note on this chart is how Thursday's low was a perfect retest of the declining channel / bear flag that broke up on Monday morning. If we do see a break downwards today I would be looking for the next low to be signaled by positive divergence on the 15min RSI, as that has been working very well over the sideways action over the last few days:

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