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.

Gold’s Public Sentiment

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Gold’s public sentiment is generally over-bullish, but…

Gold’s public sentiment (graph & data from Sentimentrader.com) registered an extreme last month as the market was supposedly anxious about war abroad and the political war here in the US. Oh, and more importantly, there is the slowly decelerating economy and the Federal Reserve, weakening from its previously hawkish policy.

Gold and silver Commitments of Traders (CoT) data are also indicating over-bullish sentiment by speculators. But this all goes with a bullish market. I mean, just look at stocks. The stock market has been structurally over-bullish all year, periodically reset by little yips and twitches in sentiment. So why not gold?

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Air Stall

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I had never really considered United Airlines a great short candidate. Airlines are notoriously lame businesses, which is why until recently UAL had a P/E ratio of 7, which is an old school 1982 type fundamental. Anyway, after blasting triple digits higher in just three months for no particular reason, I decided to get my razor out, so I bought puts on it yesterday.

Here’s a Lollipop, Jimmy

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There are a number of words that are so over-used that I get annoyed just reading them. “Weaponizing” is one of them. I’m not sure when it came into existence, but these days, especially when referring to government departments, everyone is weaponing this, or weaponizing that.

Another word is “performative“, but I’m afraid it’s appropriate in the case of Bitcoin. The whole obsession with BTC getting to six figures is an utterly performative act, which it managed to achieve last night (with futures, mind you, not the cash market) for all of about 2 milliseconds. After that, it fell $2,000, because why not.

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