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.

Amid The Political Drama

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There are plenty of risks in the equity and bond markets this year, and the Greenland drama over the last week has been a good illustration of that. There was a lot of political drama last year and so far this year it seems that might even accelerate.

Next year Donald Trump will probably be a lame duck President without control of the House (very likely) and possibly also the Senate (theoretically possible but unlikely), and that may slow the chaos down, though he will still likely have a lot more power than lame duck Presidents have traditionally wielded.

In my post on Monday 19th December I was looking at a setup for possible new all time highs on SPX, QQQ, DIA and IWM in the Santa rally, and some of that played out over the remainder of December.

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The Trouble with Bubbles

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Happy New Year everyone and I hope you had a great holiday. 🙂

Just a few comments on the overall picture going into this year before I get started on the shorter term picture. Alan Greenspan famously stated that it was hard to identify speculative bubbles and I disagree. It isn’t hard to identify speculative bubbles, what is hard is to identify is when they are going to burst.

Plainly there is a speculative bubble now in progress in Tech and AI. I was reading a comment this morning that NVDA’s market capitalisation is now higher than the combined market capitalisations of Europe’s largest twenty companies. The takeaway of the writer was that Europe is increasingly irrelevant. My takeaway was that European stocks currently look much better value than US Tech stocks.

As it happens world stocks excluding US were up about 29% in 2025 and US stocks were up about 16%. I suspect that US stocks will relatively underperform in 2026 as well. Berkshire Hathaway has now been a net seller of (mainly US) stocks for twelve consecutive quarters, and they are very smart & long term money.

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Twas The Week Before Christmas

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In my last post on Tuesday I was looking at a possible retracement that we then saw play out into a low on Wednesday afternoon.

Ideally I’d have liked to see the retracement go a little lower, at the least until the bear flags on Bitcoin, Solana and Ethereum all made their targets, but as it happened they all broke down but only Solana made the target at the retest of the prior low. That leaves unfinished business below that I expect to be revisited, most likely after next week.

The Santa rally this year has so far been spiky and uncertain, with Tech trailing rather than leading the pack, but for the next week at least the historical stats are impressively bullish.

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Six of One and ……

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…. half a dozen of the other.

In my last post on Friday 12 December, I was looking at the rally since the late November lows, noting the new all time highs on DIA and IWM, and saying that I was still expecting to see all time high retests on SPX and QQQ in December.

I also noted that QQQ has been the slowest index in the rally so far, and that has made the rally after the initial move up spiky and uncertain. There is a setup here today that could go either way and I wanted to have a quick look at that as it is an interesting one.

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Beautiful Bear Flags on Crypto

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In my last post on 24th November I was saying that the bull market on Crypto was likely over, that the bear market has likely started, and was looking at the next likely downside targets in the first big decline of that bear market.

I was also talking about a rally that might be starting, and we have been watching that rally on both Crypto and equities since then.

The rally on equities has been powerful and some all time highs have been retested but on Crypto the rally has been muted and modestly sized bear flags have been forming.

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