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.

Reflecting on 2017: Part One of Three

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Preface to all three parts: 2017 has been an exciting year for Slope, and I went looking among the literally thousands of posts this year to find what I considered the most intriguing. I earmarked twenty-one of them, and since that is too much for a single post, I’ve broken them into three equal parts (I’ll publish the other two before the year is over). Here, then, are the first seven of my favorite posts from the year and a few words about each one. Thank you, Slopers, for making this place thrive for so many years.

  • The End of Invention – an angst-ridden post about my dread of boredom and desire to create something new (I didn’t realize it at the time, but SlopeCharts would cure this).
  • Ramsey’s Year-End Review – a very detailed roundup of Ramsey’s year of binary trading
  • Fear of Boredom – Clearly the angst from the earlier post was eating me alive at this point.
  • Keeping It Real – in which I go off on Dennis Gartman on his flip-flopping and, shall we say, revisionism.
  • They’re a Person Too – behaving decently toward your fellow human beings.
  • Stupidity Unwound – an analysis of the Trump effect.
  • Finger on the Trigger – a guest post about depression, suicide, and strength.

Ridiculous

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As we heard toward $20,000 this weekend on Bitcoin……….I will preface this by saying I don’t have a dog in this fight. Whether Bitcoin plummets to its intrinsic value of $0.00 and makes people look like idiots, or whether it goes to a trillion dollars per Bitcoin, it doesn’t matter to me. But I want to point out something I find just…….weird.

The press (and, in particular, Bitcoin fanboyz) seem obsessed with the notion that the market cap, so to speak, of Bitcoin is DESTINED to ascend to some higher level. We see diagrams like this:

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Amid Bad Fundamentals, Gold Sector Rally May Have Begun

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See edit at end, adding in the favorable gold and silver CoT.

We have been expecting a seasonal rally in gold, silver and the miners off of a bottom due in either December or January, as is typical of the sector. I’ve marked up Sentimentrader‘s seasonal gold pattern to show the secondary low made (on average over 30 years) in December and the January ramp up that follows (on average).

gold seasonal pattern

But we’ve long contended that noise about global strife (geopolitics), inflation and most of all China/India demand need to be tuned out and the larger component planets of the Macrocosm ™ need to be respected in order to call a real bull market phase in gold and gold stocks. (more…)