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.

I Spy the US Stock Market

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We have been following gentle downtrend channels like this one in SPY on the SPX and Dow for weeks now, along with a sideways channel on NDX. Subscribers were well prepared for yesterday’s drop to the channel bottoms and what I think could be a bounce attempt per support noted on this chart.

MACD and RSI are weak, the trend is down, STO has probably not bottomed after crossing below 80 and OBV is very weak. I think we bounce, but those with bearish conviction will be looking at the moving average cluster (which would fill the gap) or as an extreme, the channel top as limiters.

spy daily chart

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Semi Bearish?

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By Biiwii

A technical look at Semi stocks and the Semiconductor index

I must be bearish the Semi Equipment sector because I am short both LRCX and AMAT; the former a successful NFTRH+ long position that hit target and found resistance as anticipated by this chart originally included with the update. I am not so worried about the gap because it changed the trend and gaps that alter the trend of a stock can take a long while to fill.

amat weekly chart

I went through all the reasons I am bearish the Semi Equipment sector in this post at NFTRH.com, so we don’t need to cover that ground again. The Equipment sector is decelerating, period. But the Semis are more than the Equipment guys, they are the chip makers too, or even especially.

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Semi Book-to-Bill Ratio Decelerates

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I see analysis out there discussing the Semiconductor sector as a whole as being under valued relative to other stock market sectors. This seems to be based on the fact that the SOX chart has not made nearly the catch up move that for example, the NDX has in its post 2000 recovery.

While charts can provide many helpful views to probabilities, they cannot get inside an industry and divine the importance of a sub-sector (Semi Equipment; AMAT, LRCX, etc.) within a sector as a whole. The equipment companies (which I am short) are the Canary’s Canary, with the Semi sector in general being an economic Canary in a Coal Mine.

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Precious Metals: A Positive Big Picture View of Risk vs. Reward

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While routinely following the precious metals as one of many sectors in NFTRH, we have mostly left it alone with respect to public writing over the last few years. That is because it is in a bear market and since I am not a slick short-term trader, I have felt it is best to mostly just let it play out to the bear’s will without overly active involvement.

But several indicators have us on alert that 2016 is going to be the year that the bear ends in gold and gold stocks. So why not publicly discuss the shiny rock a bit more in anticipation? I am still 100% in line with the value aspect of a monetary metal that is historically sought after in times of doubt about the Monetary Politburo’s (Central Bankers’) ability to manipulate the global macro backdrop as desired and to positive effect over the long-term.

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Consumer Prices: A Sticky Situation

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We have noted anecdotally that there is a creeping inflation in the system. It does not show up in commodities, which are in a post-bubble (ah, the good old ‘China story’ that was so vigorously promoted to a degree that would make a gold bug promoter blush) melt down. Crashing costs like that are providing the Goldilocks-like balance to rising costs within the economy.

This morning, the highly recommended Daily Shot had among its macro graphs a look at the “sticky” consumer price index. That got me to go over to the St. Louis Fed website and pull a couple different views of it. First, here is SLF’s description of the sticky index…

“The Sticky Price Consumer Price Index (CPI) is calculated from a subset of goods and services included in the CPI that change price relatively infrequently. Because these goods and services change price relatively infrequently, they are thought to incorporate expectations about future inflation to a greater degree than prices that change on a more frequent basis. One possible explanation for sticky prices could be the costs firms incur when changing price.”

These could be considered the embedded costs within the economy, like the steady upward march in healthcare or my trash collector’s price increases due to administrative and regulatory issues built into this particular service (despite dropping fuel costs).

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