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.

Deja Vu All Over Again

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In my post at the start of last week I was looking at the escalating economic shock that is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but also noting that the lack of patterns on equity indices from the late March lows were nonetheless looking higher.

US equity indices haven’t gone up a lot since then, with the exception of an impressive performance on QQQ, but I’m still thinking that SPX and QQQ in particular may go higher still and have some trendline targets to put forward in the event that turns out to be the case.

First though I’d like to look quickly at the current status of the Iran War and then take you on a walk down memory lane looking at the weeks before the last really big crisis in equities, which was of course the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020.

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So Far, So Good in The Strait

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I’ve written well over two thousand posts over the last sixteen years, and this will be the first that doesn’t include any charts that I drew myself. That feels a bit strange but I’m writing this post to draw everyone’s attention to what is really important about this Iran War.

The war itself is largely irrelevant. Whether the US, Israel or Iran are bombing, or blockading, or blustering doesn’t really matter. All that is really important on the bigger picture are the Strait of Hormuz and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the two key chokepoints for world trade routes in the Middle East:

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The Four Horsemen

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Cotton, Wheat, Corn and Soybeans

There were four big setups, each covering multiple tickers, that I was looking in my bi-weekly The Bigger Picture webinars last year and at the start of this year that looked very strong, but I was struggling to come up with any decent fundamental reasons why they might play out.

That changed when the US attacked Iran on 28th February, and since then I have been looking at these four big setups as follows:

War – I looked at the oil setups in my posts on 3rd and 13th March. Those setups have made the first targets but haven’t yet made the extension targets at retests of the 2022 highs on $BRENT, $WTIC and $GASO.

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Schrodinger’s Strait

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In my post on Tuesday 31st March I was saying that the likely best thing that could happen in the Iran War was that the US declares victory and that the war has ended regardless of any input from Iran. This would avoid further escalation and the major economic shock to the world economy that would likely result from longer term disruption to the Strait of Hormuz and likely also the Bab El-Mandeb Strait.

In my post on Wednesday 8th April after Trump declared a ceasefire and accepted talks on the basis of Iran’s ten point plan I posted charts showing bottoming patterns on SPX, QQQ, DIA and IWM that had broken up and those all made their targets last week, with new all time highs on SPX, QQQ and IWM on the back of a ceasefire in Lebanon and numerous statements last week suggesting that a peace deal was close.

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In The Eye Of The Storm

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In my last post on Wednesday last week I was looking at how far the current rally on equities might get, and at the prospects that peace negotiations with Iran might deliver something positive.

I was skeptical about the prospects for a negotiated peace, and the talks in Islamabad on Saturday were abandoned after a day, as there was never really anything to talk about. The ten points that the US had accepted as a basis for negotiation were maximalist demands from Iran that would in effect have been a humiliating surrender by the US, and the alternative proposals from the US team on Saturday were maximalist demands that asked in effect for a humiliating surrender by Iran. The talks never had any realistic chance of success or even progress on this basis.

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