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.

Hedging TLT

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A Bearish Consensus Growing On Bonds

In a post on Monday (“Hedging to a Hundred“), Tim predicted a ~15% drop for the iShares Barclays 20 year+ Treasury Bond ETF (TLT). There seems to be a bearish consensus growing on bonds in general. Also on Monday, in an interview on Bloomberg TV, GAMCO Investors portfolio manager Larry Haverty offered this warning for bond investors:

We
have a bond bubble… And the public, I am totally convinced, does not
understand it’s going to be possible to lose money in bonds

Haverty
didn’t make as precise a prediction as Tim, but it’s interesting to see technical and fundamental views align here, as Haverty becomes the latest prognosticator to warn about bond bubble.


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The Case For AAPL (by Springheel Jack)

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I have been talking every day about AAPL over the last few days and the reason for that is simple. Unless we are going to see a serious technical breakdown on AAPL the most likely place that the current decline would bottom out is at rising channel support on the weekly (LOG) chart, and that was finally tested on Friday. It is holding so far. Will it continue to hold? Hard to say, but the technical setup here certainly looks promising as I'll detail below. 

I was saying a couple of weeks ago that there was not yet a clear pattern for the AAPL decline, and that, as I've mentioned before, is often an indication that it is too early in the trend for the pattern to have become clear. Now though it is clear, and it is a bullish falling wedge. If the current low can hold then there is also very encouraging positive RSI divergence on the daily chart. What AAPL needs to do next is break up from this rising wedge, and if we see that happen, then the low should be in:

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Regarding Gold

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If you are not a casino patron and if you are patient, you will
realize that the disconnect of gold from the ‘risk on’ trade currently
taking a manic and global center stage is a good thing.

gold bar

Gold, a big hunk of value storage in a monetary world gone off the
charts, just sits there, waiting out the ridiculous lurches by casino
patrons over the years.

Summer of 2011, casino patrons jerk to the right (momo'ing a store of value).  Winter of 2013, casino patrons jerk to the left (momo'ing risk).

Do you see the humor and the tragedy in all of this?

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