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.

Launch!

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While at near-term risk, the gold sector is launching, not blowing off

Okay, the title of the post is a bit of a joke at this late stage of the rally because it sounds like hype and we have actually been calling the move in the gold sector a potential launch for weeks now, since gold and HUI each busted through their bear market limiters, the EMA 75 and EMA 55, respectively.

gold and hui

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Growth or Inflation?

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The Federal Reserve states that its goal is to promote employment and economic growth while regulating inflation. As if it is as simple as pulling levers, tweaking a few knobs and dialing up just the right amount of inflation per unit of economic growth. The hubris and ego involved here is incredible.

For the last several years global macro dynamics had allowed the Fed to operate in a highly inflationary manner, while inflation’s effects discretely festered in areas of the ‘services’ economy (like healthcare, regulatory entities, real estate, leisure and hospitality and certain food items). It became clear to me that despite commodities driving down the raw costs of doing business, inflation’s effects had embedded in the services economy when my trash hauler informed of a rate increase due to regulations in the services chain, despite the crash in fuel costs. That is just one little example. Larger examples infect the entire economy.

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Gold’s Full House

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Using the Macrocosm theme again (I can’t get enough of this gimmick) let’s update some key gold ratios in poker terms.

macrocosm

Gold is currently working on a ‘full house’, with three of a kind (gold out performs stock markets, gold rises vs. commodities and gold rises vs. global currencies). We can call the pair needed to complete the full house economic contraction (to varying degrees globally) and confidence declines.

Gold vs. Stock Markets (more…)

Various Markets; Weekly Views

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It occurs to me that in public writing I tend to bludgeon people with macro fundamentals (like gold vs. positively correlated markets, yield relationships and even confidence in global policy makers), market indicators (VIX, Equity Put/Call, Gold-Silver ratio, Sentiment, Participation, etc.) and other views beneath the surface of things. So much so that I sometimes forget that people might like to see simple nominal charting as a frame of reference.

We update charts like these every week in NFTRH, but I have done relatively few for public review. So here it is, a simple weekly chart update of various markets, with very limited commentary interference from me.

US Stock Market (more…)