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.

Apple’s Trek to the Ordinary

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Over the past ten months, in steps almost too small to be noticed by the mass media, Apple has shed over two hundred billion dollars in value. That’s nearly one quarter of a trillion dollars in wealth which would have fed shareholder dreams of new houses, new boats, new jewelry, and mink coats, but……….it’s gone.

The thing is, I think the slide is far, far from over. I wrote a piece earlier this year (which got picked up by some of the mainstream press) predicting that Apple would fall to the mid-70s. We’re already heading into the low 90s, so my goofy prediction is seeming a little less insane.

0126-gloomy

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Has AMZN Finally Topped?

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By Zac Mannes, ElliottWaveTrader.net

In January 2015 I posted an Insta-blog on Seeking Alpha calling for a low in the 280 region prior to the January earnings report. In that post I called for a resumption of the long term rally looking for a target well over 450. AMZN did not disappoint, and in our regular StockWaves updates we tracked the progress and continued to revise the extension targets and raise the support levels. While the potential for further extension in this Primary degree 3rd wave is still possible, the failure to hold higher levels of support as well as the failure to utilize the most recent ER for a potential extension setup makes it more likely that the early stages of the Primary Wave 4 are underway.
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Gold Stock Sector: Rubber, Meet Road

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You may have noticed that I have written relatively little publicly about the gold sector over the last few years (we have covered it consistently in NFTRH to keep subscribers aware of the bear’s status, and protected against it). Is that strange for a writer who was probably known first and foremost as a ‘gold guy’? Not at all! It’s just that it is not desirable to get bogged down obsessing on a sector in a bear market when there are other fish to fry on the global macro landscape. But the process of finding and confirming a bottom in the gold sector is now front and center as more of the fundamentals that actually matter come into place. To those fundamentals, we need to marry the technicals.

We have consistently worked a theme that sees a comparison to the 1999-2001 bottoming phase in the gold sector. That was a time when stock markets topped out, an economic counter cycle took hold and gold began out performing most other items. Within this, we have also been considering the possibility of a final washout within the sector, whereby prices decline despite continually improving fundamentals. This condition was in play in Q4 2008, which was the last great buying opportunity.

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