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.

Stocks, Commodities and Gold (Part 1 of 2)

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It has now been exactly 10 months since we established 2410 as the measured objective for the S&P 500. In forming a potential double top this week at 2405.77 I’d say we are close enough to call the target in (as we did in February when the first top was made on what we called “peak Trump” day, post-congressional address).

Now, a target is not a stop sign; in this case it was a long-term objective based on a chart pattern, period. It could make me look like the genius I certainly am not, or it could just pause at the target on its way to further upside mania and a potential market blow off. Don’t let ’em baffle you with bullshit, nobody knows which of those, or whatever else may be in store. (more…)

An Update on Commodities

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In NFTRH 447 we used individual daily charts for the CRB index and various individual commodity items. This was in order to better view details of the bearish (but bouncing, as expected) state of the complex. Below are some of the more general daily charts we usually review (along with weekly charts) each week in NFTRH.

CRB and crude oil look bearish, NatGas is stable to constructive, copper is bearish as it consolidates the big bump, Agri is neutral/non-starter and the Uranium holder is bearish, exactly as we expected the fallout from the previous pump job to be.

crb

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Tax Reform and the ‘Repatriation’ Trade

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The following is the opening segment of the May 14th edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole…

Since the Trump victory we have heard all about the coming fiscal policies that would replace the non-stop and brilliantly evil* monetary policies employed by the Fed since the 2008 market crash. These fiscal policies range from the hair-brained (rust belt factory job repatriation) to the silly (building a border wall in lieu of modernizing security-focused information and surveillance technologies) to the arduous (fixing the Healthcare system) to the sound (well-targeted tax cuts). We’ll get tax cuts, but how well targeted they’ll turn out to be will be debated endlessly and I for one don’t think the trend of the rich getting hyper richer and the poor getting poorer is going to reverse any time soon. For reference, see this post at Biiwii. (more…)

A Look at the Silver/Gold Ratio, Inflation/Deflation and the Yield Curve

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An email from a reader (of the eLetter, I think) calling me out on trying to make too many correlations in a dysfunctional market (I think that was his bottom line point, and he’s got a good point) got me thinking about the Silver/Gold ratio and some pretty interesting post-2011 dysfunction (so it seems) in the markets.

Markets that made sense in certain ways prior to 2011 no longer make sense in the same ways. For instance, the S&P 500 used to be correlated to the Silver/Gold ratio, which itself was positively correlated to inflation and/or inflationary economic growth. Gold also liked for silver to be leading it, not the other way around.

silver/gold ratio

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Huey’s Looking Haggard These Days, But…

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unnamed-e1493929093838HUI is torn, frayed and downright bearish. What’s more, it’s been bearish since it started to drop from the SMA 200 failure point.

In NFTRH, we managed bounce #1 (off the Dec. low) as just that, a bounce. Then we managed bounce #2 as just that, a bounce. It doesn’t take a trained eye to see why; only a rise above the October high would have set an uptrend for bounce #1 and a rise above the February high would have set an uptrend for bounce #2.

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