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.

SPX Cycles, Fed Funds and Gold

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This “amateur cyclist’s” chart (I am anything but a cycles analyst) of the S&P 500 shows that the 12 month marker (C12) meant exactly nothing as the market remained firmly on trend, after brief pokes down in April and May. We noted that C12 was a lesser indicator than the 30 month cycle, which has coincided with some pretty significant changes (+/- a few months). That cycle (C30) is coming due at the end of the summer. Will it mean anything? Well, this market eats top callers for breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snacks. But it is worth knowing about to a lucid and well-armed market participant.

spx cycles

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Bonds and Related Indicators

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Excerpted from the June 25 edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole, which also included comprehensive analysis of US and global stock markets, commodities, precious metals and stock charts galore (with the Market Internals segment, in particular, having evolved into what I find to be a must-have guide).

TLT is now a buck from its target of 129. Tell me, where is all that mania about rising interest rates and the likes of the “R.I.P. Bond Bull Market” headlines (Bloomberg called the bottom almost to the day with that Louise Yamada hype). Now a mature bounce labors on. 129 does not need to stop the move, but it’s a long-standing marker, so… (more…)

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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