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.

Improved SlopeCharts Interface

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I am pleased to let you know a couple of big improvements to SlopeCharts, and these improvements are available to all users. Please note that you should press Ctrl+F5 on the SlopeCharts page to clear the cache and make sure you are using the most recent version.

As new features have been added, the menu bar at the top has been getting increasingly crowded. At this point, it just barely fits on a laptop screen.

1021-wifemenu

Since there are dozens of new featurings forthcoming in the product, this was intolerable, so what we’ve done is fold all the functions into a single menu. Importantly, we’ve also folded into the menu some of the “right click” menus that some people may not realize are there. It’s important to me that all of SlopeCharts functions are obvious and apparent. (more…)

“Great Rotation” Ahead: Inflationary or Deflationary?

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Update: This article ultimately leans toward the view that the reasons for a rising curve will be inflationary. But I woke up in the middle of the night and my thoughts drifted to the components of the article (yeah, that’s pretty sad, I know), and with further consideration I am leaning toward neutral or even a bit into the deflationary camp. The reasons will be the stuff of another article.

Think back to the blaring headlines about the Great Promotion  Rotation in the financial media in 2013. Perhaps the media circus started in January of that year when The Economist asked the question of whether the rise in bond yields signaled a “flight” out bonds and into equities. It was probably an earnest and right minded question asked by The Economist, but you know our friends in the greater financial media; get a good story and flog the hell out of it to harvest eyeballs. Reality be damned, man, it’s the eyeballs that matter!

As the mini hysteria grew that year we called it a “Great Promotion” (by the financial media) in expectation that the Continuum’s limiter (the red monthly EMA 100 on the 30 year bond yield chart below) would hold once again, just as it had during Bill Gross’s inflation hysterics that signaled a top in inflationary angst in early 2011. By the end of 2013, our ears were ringing with the media buzz and drone about the “Great Rotation”.

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