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.

Taste It

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The market has gone catatonic. Volume is anemic. The put/call ratio is the lowest it has been in twenty years. Daily ranges are as big as Hervé Villechaize. In spite of all that, let’s take a look and some updated index charts.

Starting off with the S&P 500, you can see that it has tried, and failed, on seven different occasions to push past the horizontal line. It’s getting kind of ridiculous at this point. Indeed, four days in a row just recently. I can’t remember ever seeing anything like this in my life. (Of course, in this totally fake market, nothing surprises me anymore).

spx
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Gold’s Inflation Utility

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Gold is okay, but not yet unique

There are times when gold is an okay inflation hedge, while under-performing the likes of industrial metals, oil/energy, materials, etc. During those times, if you’re doggedly precious metals focused you should consider silver, which, as a hybrid precious metal/industrial commodity, has more pro-cyclical inflation utility than gold.

But as I have argued for much of the last year, if the inflated situation is working toward cyclical progress (as it is currently) then there is a world full of trades and investments out there to choose from, many of which are trouncing gold (which, as I have belabored for the better part of 2 decades now, is not about price but instead, value) in the inflated price casino.

The latest ISM Report on Business shows one negative among the important areas as employment declined. Now, before we get too excited about that gold-positive reading let’s also realize that manufacturing employment is still growing, new orders are briskly increasing, backlogs are up and customer inventories are down. In short, manufacturing continues to boom.

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