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.

US Stock Market and the Gold Sector

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To review our stance, which is years along now, the gold sector is not going anywhere until it becomes widely accepted that developed stock markets, including and especially those in the US, are in bear cycles. We have also drawn analogies to the Q4 2008 event that took place in what felt like a nanosecond compared to today’s long, drawn out process. For this reason, a better ‘comp’ has been the 1999 to 2001 time frame. That was a process as well.

Regardless, gold boosters viewing inflation as the reason to buy the sector are still out there pitching, but even they have retooled their pitches for a deflationary world. It is now and always has been a global economic contraction environment (assuming it eventually coerces policy makers into inflationary actions) that would be the primary driver of the next gold bull market. Say, whatever happened to all the stories about China demand, a China/India love trade, supply/demand capers on the COMEX and ‘US jobs to spur inflation driving big, smart institutional money into gold’ anyway?

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Swing Baby, Swing!

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This article assumes one is trading the up and down swings in the stock market. Swing traders are just one segment of a market population that includes those sitting in cash (and/or risk ‘off’ vehicles like Treasury Bonds), maintaining longer-term short positions, our always bullish friends, the “stocks for the long-term” contingent and of course, the indomitable Gold Bug “community”, focusing as ever on one asset class while a world full of other assets is in motion.

“Let’s go let’s go, he’s no batter, he’s no batter… (pitch comes to the plate) SWING BATTER!!!”

That was the exact line we were coached to use in little league. Picture it, eight kids out there on every pitch taunting the kid at bat with with a canned line in high pitched, pre-pubescent voices. Yeh, that was intimidating.

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Market Swing Management

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up and down The following is the opening, introductory segment from this week’s edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole. After setting these general ground rules for swing trading this market, NFTRH 378 clearly illustrated the US market from several different technical, leadership, market indicator and sentiment angles. We also thoroughly updated global markets, currencies and explicitly broke down the gold sector to be clear on what will be in place technically, sector-fundamentally and macro-fundamentally when a real bottom is achieved for this counter-cyclical sector.

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December Payrolls: ‘Back End’ Still Strong, Let’s Look Closer

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It is important to distinguish the ‘back end’ from the ‘front end’ of the economy or else all you end up with hype emanating from the financial sphere every time an economic data release comes out. For example, I was critical of Martin Armstrong’s post, Is the recession Starting? in a rebuttal post, Armstrong 3+ Decades Late on Manufacturing because Marty’s post not only brought back some jaw droppingly old fashioned concepts about US manufacturing (JiT and automation replacing labor) but it focused only on the ‘front end’ of the economy, affirming the “ECM” in a short info-blurb.

While we caught the downturn in manufacturing ahead of time (July) and also have been on the sharp deceleration in Semiconductor bookings and billings (a two month trend now), these Canaries in the Economic Coal Mine are just front end clues. Meanwhile, as we have been noting for months in NFTRH, the back end, with a strong US dollar at its back, has been doing just fine.

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Armstrong 3+ Decades Late on Manufacturing

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By Biiwii

As you may know, certain things get stuck in my craw from time to time because I came from industry, not from the abstract world of stock markets, finance and Keynesian economics. In short, I made stuff and sold stuff. The pressure was always there to get better, more efficient, more employee friendly, more modern. We did well in those regards, starting in the early 80’s.

Along comes a post by Martin Armstrong, the detailed merits of whom I will not debate because I don’t study him closely enough. Suffice it to say that I do not care for the cult-like following that seems to hold he and his computer, Socrates aloft in much the same way I did not care for the cult-like following (of “Comrades in Golden Arms”) that held aloft James Sinclair, by way of whom many people came to know Mr. Armstrong.

Indeed, too many smart people seem to put great weight on Martin Armstrong for the non-guru likes of me to criticize him in general. But I will go by what I read when the material is on a subject that I know about. US Manufacturing is a subject that I know about intimately; politics and associated biases are not. Yesterday, from Armstrong in response to another poor ISM release…

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