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.

2025 Followed Gold’s Lead

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Silver Followed (And How)

2025 was was a bad one in many ways except investment (IMO & speaking personally)

A silver (and gold) lining was, of course, the precious metals sector for we who had anticipated the bull. Gold led, the rest of the precious metals complex, and eventually broader markets, followed.

2026? It can’t get any worse socio-politically, and pending a potential Q1/H1 liquidity issue, could be just as good investment-wise

With the Fed already on a rate cutting regimen and positioned for some form of QE (as it plans to buy short-term Treasuries and let MBS roll off the books), and Trump soon to tap a yes-man to chair the Fed, the inflation problem they appear to want to summon should lift a wider segment of the broad commodity and resources sectors.

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The Trouble with Bubbles

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Happy New Year everyone and I hope you had a great holiday. 🙂

Just a few comments on the overall picture going into this year before I get started on the shorter term picture. Alan Greenspan famously stated that it was hard to identify speculative bubbles and I disagree. It isn’t hard to identify speculative bubbles, what is hard is to identify is when they are going to burst.

Plainly there is a speculative bubble now in progress in Tech and AI. I was reading a comment this morning that NVDA’s market capitalisation is now higher than the combined market capitalisations of Europe’s largest twenty companies. The takeaway of the writer was that Europe is increasingly irrelevant. My takeaway was that European stocks currently look much better value than US Tech stocks.

As it happens world stocks excluding US were up about 29% in 2025 and US stocks were up about 16%. I suspect that US stocks will relatively underperform in 2026 as well. Berkshire Hathaway has now been a net seller of (mainly US) stocks for twelve consecutive quarters, and they are very smart & long term money.

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