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 in Three Time Frames

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Please don’t listen to the “gold smack down” cry babies, always making rationalizations or excuses, I beg of you. Don’t listen to the “gold is nothing but a stupid rock they dig out of the ground” neo hipster wise guys either. Gold just is, and the gold bug “community” makes way more of it than that, taking it to the realm of the mystical or worse, religious (as in a war of good vs. evil).

The wise guys wish gold did not exist (but it is) because it gets in the way of so many paper and digital advances and innovations (or shenanigans), not to mention boundless egghead theories about a new era of finance. Get this wise guys; we are still, each of us, bags of bones, blood and guts in some cases with high functioning brains that tend to forget that fact. We are emotional beings; humans. Gold has provided stability to emotions in the financial realm for centuries.

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US Dollar and the Bond Continuum ©

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The US currency is up this morning and surprise surprise, gold, among other things is down (gold bugs should not be in worry mode, they should be in general preparation mode… and I don’t mean canned goods and Uni bomber shacks).

Meanwhile, the USD would not be disruptive for US stocks unless/until it gets impulsive and attends a flight to the risk ‘off’ side of the boat. Short of that, a rise in the dollar puts stocks on notice, but doesn’t croak them in real time (as evidenced by the 2014 up phase). Meanwhile, logical rotation is the theme.

If USD goes on to do what I think it will do, the declining black line AKA the 200 day moving average, is the target. So far, so good as Unc is making good progress at turning the MA 50 into support. I am very long pro-USD vehicles. (more…)

Effective Market Management: Art & Science

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saul steinberg
From Saul Steinberg’s 1954 drawing ‘The Line’

The notion that there is art involved in interpreting the economy and financial markets is probably heresy to many market participants and probably 99.9% of economists (that .1% guy being the one who’s excluded from the meetings and egghead social gatherings), whether they be right or left leaning (I always find it entertaining to hear right wing and left wing economists duke it out, as I did on NPR yesterday, coming to diametrically opposed conclusions amid the tax reform debate). (more…)

In Marketing and in Markets, Don’t be the Mark!

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I have made countless posts lampooning the mainstream media and its eyeball harvesting, click baiting content. This content and especially the associated headlines (let’s recall the classic R.I.P. Bond Bull Market as Charts Say Last Gasps Have Been Taken, dated Dec. 2016 as but one example) are designed to whip up emotions, draw attention and thereby gain traffic and ad dollars (diminishing though they are these days). nftrh.com is and always will be ad-free, by the way.

So sure, the bond bull market may well have ended in the Brexit and NIRP dominated summer of anxiety (in fact I believe it did), but any good contrarian would have seen the trade setup to go bearish on bonds in the middle of that hysteria, not a half a year later when Bloomberg used Louis Yamada’s chart to make a big headline. From a post in June 2016 about the Silver/Gold ratio and the prospects for a future ‘inflation trade’ right at the height of the bond bull… (more…)

Stocks and Gold; Macro Pivot Window Upon Us

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On August 11 the potential and reasoning for anticipated pivots in the US stock market and the gold sector were noted in this article: Potential Pivots Upcoming for Stocks and Gold

As for the stock market, several reasons were put forward in support of a 2nd half of September through Q4 danger period, for a correction (no need yet to talk bear market because that would be pure promotion of an agenda). Please note that standard technical analysis was not among those reasons. The stock market was then and is now, in an uptrend across all important time frames.

The reasons for the correction view noted in the article ranged from the S&P 500’s 30 month cycle, to the Fed’s Funds cycle and its proximity to the 2yr yield (this has not yet made a bear signal) to the US dollar’s potential to rally (still waiting on that one) to a rough seasonal patch that begins in mid-September. Well, today is September 15, da boyz is back from da Hamptins and the rest is up to the market’s nature to take its course. (more…)