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.

Crypto Falters

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All assets are joined at the hip. It didn’t used to be that way. These days, however, with the government fully in charge of thrusting liquidity into the markets, it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about gold, stocks, or kitty litter, everything moves up or down together. This is why I’d like to highlight the fact that Bitcoin ($BTC) seems to be squandering its opportunity to burst forth from its green basing pattern, shown below. Instead, it has spent a week just lamely roaming around doing nothing. It is entirely possible the price is going to slip well into that green zone, spoiling the setup and souring the entire crypto space.

I sure hope so!

Emerging Profits

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First off, a tip of the hat to five-star general and long-time Sloper NYUGrad, whom I had the pleasure of meeting very early this morning. We spent about an hour together (including his dog, which was a big bonus) walking around the southern tip of Manhattan. What a pleasure to meet one of you folks in person!

It’s a good (and rare) day for the bears so far. In addition to my typical “doesn’t expire for many months” puts, I had been, from time to time, buying some crazy-short-term ETF puts recently. The most recent was yesterday, when I acquired some EEM (emerging markets ETF) May 31st puts. They’re up 173% right now, so I sold half off, leaving the rest as a runner (I think that’s the term?) Whee!

Beautiful Curves

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It’s just 3:30 in the morning, Tim-time, but the sun started rising over the East River half an hour ago, so I’m up and about. It’s interesting to see how the narrative of the market is falling to pieces. The thesis of this entire ridiculous 2024 rally has been that (a) multiple interest rate cuts from a Biden-loving Fed and (b) low inflation would both contribute to a stock market that did nothing but make new highs every day.

Yet what do we have? Well, we have a plunging bond market, thanks to the fact that Powell has cut rates precisely ZERO times almost halfway through the year (in contract to the 5 cuts predicted before)……..

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