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.

Four Horsemen – The US Dollar

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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 I have since written two posts on the (very bullish) setups on the oil charts first on 3rd March, and after the first phase of those bottoming setups had all made target, with a follow up on 13th March. As these patterns were all at the bottom of decent quality bull flags from the 2022 highs, I am still expecting to see full retests of the 2022 highs on all of $WTIC (Light Crude Oil), $BRENT (Brent Crude Oil) and $GASO (Gasoline), with $HOIL (Heating Oil) having already reached that target.

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There Is No ‘I’ in ‘TACO’

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The Iran War and the US equity markets have reached an interesting stage and I am watching with great interest to see what happens next. I’ll be reviewing the setup on equities here mainly but first I’ll review where we seem to be on the Iran war.

I was saying in my last post on Thursday 12 March that Trump had a problem in this crisis in that if he wanted to TACO here, likely by declaring victory, withdrawing US forces and moving on to something else, then the problem was that this would necessarily require some kind of agreement with Iran, and Iran, under new, younger and much angrier management, was showing no interest in talking.

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Oil Escalated Quickly, So What Now?

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In my last post on oil on Tuesday 3rd March I was laying out the very bullish scenario on oil that had been forming since a series of falling wedges from the 2022 highs on light crude, heating oil and gasoline broke up in June 2025.

The large bottoming patterns on heating oil and gasoline had already started to break up when I wrote that post, and by Sunday night the double bottom on light crude had also broken up, and all of those bottoming patterns had reached target. So what now?

Well, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the Iran conflict over the last few days, and it’s hard to say how long this war might last.

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It Takes Two To Tango

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In my last post on Thursday 5th March I was looking at the possible topping setups on the US indices in the light of the war on Iran that started on Saturday February 28th.

That war is ongoing and while the US is now extending feelers about a ceasefire to the Iranian side, those have so far been rejected. That may be because the initial attacks on Iran were launched while the last peace talks were still ongoing, or it could be that Iran’s new Supreme Leader is still a bit annoyed about his parents, wife, and one of his children being killed in those attacks, but ultimately the problem here is that while one side unilaterally can start a war by attacking, one side unilaterally can only end a war by surrendering. Any other outcome requires at least some cooperation between the warring sides.

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War is Peace

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The conflict in Iran is only a few days old, and as yet it is hard to see how it will develop, and there seems little agreement as to whether it counts as a war. Both Trump and Hegseth have referred to it repeatedly as a war, but as only Congress has the constitutional authority to declare war in the US, there have also been numerous explanations from administration officials and the Speaker of the House as to why it is not actually a war. I think President Trump described it as a ‘Special Military Operation’ at one point yesterday and for a number of reasons perhaps that is the best way to describe it.

I wrote a post on Tuesday looking at the possible major disruption in oil markets that could happen if Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic and the US is trying to prevent that, but we’ll have to see how that goes.

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