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.

A Treasure Trove of Nuggets From the MSM

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It is summer slack season, with no FOMC meeting in August and so into the void go our friends in the mainstream media, with all sorts of noise to distract investors. Here’s one that was anticipated…

Fed should raise interest rates this year, Williams says

From NFTRH 406 (July 31), after the July FOMC meeting in which they fretted about inflation not being high enough (ha ha ha):

“Yes yes, I know the Fed does not see enough inflation yet. And that is just the point. They told us last week that there is not enough inflation and damned if they are not going to keep trying to promote it. It is also worth considering that while they will probably send various expectations managers to their assigned microphones, there is no meeting in August and there is a lot of room for asset price appreciation between now and September 21, per their wishes I assume (by their policy inactions and their inflationary words).

What they didn’t tell us is that they are not stupid (misguided in my opinion, but not stupid) and they know that something built on inflation (metaphor: a substance with opiate-like qualities) must have ongoing inflation (opiates) in order to keep the markets (metaphor: patient) stable. Withdrawal of these substances would mean a come-down and financial detox that would seem like hell on earth to those who think any of this is normal or organic in anyway (like a Keynesian intellectual, for instance).

The game of Whack-a-Mole is ongoing and institutionalized. It is an exciting time to be an investor a casino patron. But we need to be aware of things like the music stopping, how many chairs there are when the music stops and our own egos, bias and limitations.”

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People from Porlock

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I don’t know whether many of you are familiar with Coleridge’s poem ‘Kubla Khan’, but he told a lovely story about why this (wonderful) poem is clearly only a fragment of what should have been a larger work. His story was that he woke up from a (polite cough) vivid dream with the poem complete in his mind, and wrote down what remains as soon as he woke up. While he was still writing there was a knock on the door and he was distracted by a man from Porlock who kept him occupied for an hour sorting out something minor, and when he at last returned to his room he found that he had forgotten most of the remainder of the poem. The story may or may not be true but it’s a great story, and we have all met our own men from Porlock on a regular basis I’m sure.

It’s been that kind of day for me and I’ve been tied up by various things & I apologise for this very late post, though the charts are still relevant, and it was a reasonable inference from my post yesterday that today was likely to be dull on SPX/ES, and so it has worked out. I’m posting the ES, NQ & TF I posted for theartofchart.net members today as I haven’t have a chance to redo the SPX charts, and they give a good insight into how close a top looks on all three indexes here, though I’m expecting at least TF/RUT to make a higher high next week, with a higher high (& new ATH) less likely but still probable on ES/SPX, and possible but least likely on NQ/NDX. ES Sep 60min chart:

160812 ES Sep 60min

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