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.

Bonds and Related Indicators

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The June 18 edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole has a few less stock charts this week in order to ramp up the macro talk, which appeared periodically through the report; but especially in the Precious Metals and Bonds segments. Excerpted from NFTRH 452…

Bonds & Related Indicators (and more macro discussion)

The target for TLT continues to be around 129. Treasury bonds are in bull trends (remember back a few months ago to all the bond hatred in the media). How does an eventual decline in bonds square with what we just noted above regarding Q4 2008? [work done in the preceding Precious Metals segment] Treasury bonds were a wonderfully bullish asset during Armageddon ’08 and who’s to say that an upside blow off may not be coming sooner rather than later amid massively over bullish sentiment? I mean, there is certainly no stop sign at our 129 target. Sentiment, as we are all too aware, can take a long while to manifest in pricing.

bonds

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Gold’s “Bearish Bulls” Addressed, Now What?

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[as to the article’s title, I don’t have a firm, paint-by-numbers answer, but I surely do have strategy]

An NFTRH subscriber named Joe, who is a former fund guy and current chart cranking, idea generating maniac (←said with admiration) came up with the term “bearish bulls” recently, by which he meant that a whole lot of people were looking down in the gold sector, especially heading into this week as the dreaded ‘GDXJ rebalance’ and then next week’s FOMC loomed.

On the former, some bounce opportunities were created in oversold companies involved in the rebalance (with bearish bulls’ short covering providing the accelerant) and on the latter, I very much expect the Fed to raise the Funds Rate next week; and so does the futures market. From CME Group

fed funds rate futures

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Gold Miners in 2017 Whipsaw

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Ever since 2012’s failure of the ‘QE 3 rally’ in the precious metals it has not been fruitful to micro manage the gold sector, because that failure jump started a savage bear market that would need time to work out the excesses both in the sector’s investor base and in its mining businesses, which had become bloated and inefficient. That’s what bear markets do; they clean out the landscape to make it inhabitable for new investors one day. Here is a weekly chart showing the bear’s kickoff. HUI’s 55 week EMA then became the ball and chain that kept its fate sealed (red arrows) until January of 2016.

hui

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Currencies, and Some ‘Out There’ Thoughts on Inflation, Stocks, Gold and Miners

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NFTRH’s ‘Currencies’ segment (one among a report filled with critical insight across all major market segments and many of the stocks therein) went off its usual brief message and riffed into some macro discussion on inflation’s post-2011 path. Excerpted from the May 28th edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole

Uncle Buck’s index is weak and the SMA 50 is crossing below the SMA 200. Before long we will be reading about it in the media. Now let’s consider a theme we’ve promoted for years; when the media trumpet a “DEATH CROSS!” * it is time to brace for the opposite implication to the media’s bearish promotion. Our view has after all, included a decline to the mid-90s for the index. Meanwhile, USD/JPY is decent right at the SMA 50, USD/EUR and USD/CHF are at lateral support and USD is at least neutral vs. the Commodity currencies. (more…)