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 Stock Sector: Rubber, Meet Road

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You may have noticed that I have written relatively little publicly about the gold sector over the last few years (we have covered it consistently in NFTRH to keep subscribers aware of the bear’s status, and protected against it). Is that strange for a writer who was probably known first and foremost as a ‘gold guy’? Not at all! It’s just that it is not desirable to get bogged down obsessing on a sector in a bear market when there are other fish to fry on the global macro landscape. But the process of finding and confirming a bottom in the gold sector is now front and center as more of the fundamentals that actually matter come into place. To those fundamentals, we need to marry the technicals.

We have consistently worked a theme that sees a comparison to the 1999-2001 bottoming phase in the gold sector. That was a time when stock markets topped out, an economic counter cycle took hold and gold began out performing most other items. Within this, we have also been considering the possibility of a final washout within the sector, whereby prices decline despite continually improving fundamentals. This condition was in play in Q4 2008, which was the last great buying opportunity.

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Hulbert Does Harvey

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By Biiwii

Much more than CPI inflation needs to be considered with respect to the gold price

Yes folks, it’s the return of the two egg heads (Campbell Harvey and Claude Erb) who first put the scare into gold bugs back in 2013 with the research paper The Golden Dilemma (PDF), which found that as adjusted for CPI, gold was very over valued. Enter Mark Hulbert with the updated warning for inflation-centric gold bugs. Gold has no business being this expensive.

market hulbert, gold price vs. CPI

I have never understood who would want to be one of these “gold traders” (other than the miners with a need to hedge and bullion banks with a need to hedge and manipulate, ha ha ha). Why would you be a trader in an element that is a measure or barometer of other items and conditions? It don’t get it. I guess slick traders speculate with insurance policies, so why not gold too? Everything’s a play after all, in the casino.

To answer Hulbert’s points, beginning with the above…

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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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