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.

The Very Best of 2021 (Part 5 of 7)

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Preface to all parts: It’s that time of year again. I have written over 30,000 posts during the long history of Slope, and at the end of each year, I gather up what I consider the best of the prior year’s offerings. At the end of every year, I assume I’m utterly out of material, and yet at the same time, I look back with amazement at all the terrific posts from the year that has just completed. I’m not sure how long I can keep this up, but my concerns of content exhaustion have been proved wrong since March 2005. For your reading pleasure, I offer the following Best of 2021 Posts:

I Didn’t Ask For This
This is when I started to fall out of love with crypto

White Clouds. And Nothing Else.
A loving tribute to the late Norm Macdonald

Generation XX
A long, contemplative exploration of what has changed in the twenty years since the 9/11 attacks

Finally, It’s Clear
So, Tim: what’s the whole bear thing about?

Ladders and Mountains
Personal risk and common sense

Fatal Doses of Radiation
An oh-so-woke Oberlin kid makes my eyes roll backward

Woven Like a Noose
The stock market is slavishly following the Fed’s money-printing

First Talk Impressions

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SlopeTalk isn’t even a day old, but I wanted to say a few words about how things are going so far.

I’m pleased to see that our testing stood us in good stead, as the page seems stable and the product is, I believe, quite feature-rich. As I mentioned at the introduction, this week is dead quiet across the board (take a look at the volume on the SPY if you need proof), but I very deliberately rolled out a “community” product when there is hardly any “community” in order to keep risk very low.

I saw a few folks ask about getting a Futures channel, so even though there is already a Metals and Energy channel, I’ve added Futures for all the other stuff (such as, notably, the equity futures). One fellow made an eloquent argument for sort of an “omnibus” channel which would show the content of all the channels at once, but I’m not sure if that makes strategic or technical sense yet – – we’re exploring it.

Next month, I intend to be promoting SlopeTalk rather widely in an effort to spur participation. If you have any specific suggestions, as always, feel free to drop me a line directly. Thanks for embracing this new page so warmly!

2022: The Golden Year

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The NFTRH big picture view for gold has been bullish since calling a top in mid-2020

Pardon the promotional sound of the title. I realize it, and I’m putting it up there anyway. There is a time for temperance and there is a time for promotion. Too many in the gold sphere forget about that first thing when risk is high, and in August, 2020 it was at nosebleed levels.

As you can see, the ‘real’ commodity adjusted price of gold was already in a long-term bull market from 2008 and it had actually turned up in 2019 before getting put all out of whack during 2020’s deflationary fear fest. The relief shown in this indicator has been in play for as long as the public has been aware of the inflation created by the Fed and the ‘inflation trades’ associated with it.

Good news for gold bugs? Risk is about a million times lower now than it was in the summer of 2020 as the ratio comes back on trend.

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