Preface to all sector posts: This weekend I’m organizing charts in a different way. I’ve picked from my existing portfolio of live short positions and have grouped favorite shorts in specific sectors. Here are the selections for this group, and hopefully the markups will speak for themselves.
Slope of Hope Blog Posts
This is the heart and soul of the web site. Here we have literally tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. You can also click on any category icon to see posts tagged with that particular category.
Precious Metals, Commodities, US & Global Stocks
A general review of the current status across different asset markets. This is not comprehensive, forward-looking analysis as per NFTRH, but it is an up to the minute summary (as of Friday afternoon).
Precious Metals
Gold, silver and gold stock indexes/ETFs made what I had thought were bear flags yesterday, but today’s reversal painted them as short-term bounce patterns (‘W’ with a higher low in the miners and silver).
This chart of gold shows a flag breakdown, whipsaw and new closing high for the short-term move. As we’ve noted for weeks now, the Commitments of Traders (CoT) is in a contrary bullish alignment with large Specs all but wrung out of the market (they were fleeced again; don’t believe hype about their increased shorting being some sort of conspiracy). All in all, not bad for the relic. The bounce lives on. (more…)
Commodities Ready for Next Leg Down
American Gothic
So, honestly, I want to make sure I’ve got this straight.
- There was relatively free trade;
- We enact tariffs on agricultural imports to make them more expensive to American consumers;
- Other countries retaliate with their own tariffs, diminishing demand for American products;
- Farmers are selling less and making less money;
- So the U.S. government starts writing them checks to compensate with money we don’t have (in case the whole “$21 trillion in debt” thing wasn’t quite clear yet)
So, net result – – American consumers worse off with higher prices. Foreign consumers worse off for the same reason. American taxpayers paying for billions of checks being written to farmers.
Brilliant. (more…)
Commodities Breakdown
Between weakness in gold (which is nearing its 7th consecutive year of its own private bear market) and an oil market that’s down over 4% so far today, commodities continue to tumble away from their reversal pattern. I’m not expecting a hard fall, but things certainly seem poised to continue melting away for weeks to come.
Hi Ho, the Dario, The Farmer in the Hell
Agriculture sinking into oblivion…………
Two Mighty Runs
Hello, Slopers, and remember today is a shortened trading day, with equities closing three hours before the normal time.
My “Big Short” for 2018 remains bonds. The bond market has, since May 18th, had a powerful push higher, but as I so often write, it’s all about context. The multi-decade uptrend has decisively broken, and my view is that this bounce is nothing more than a push back toward resistance.
Keep an Eye on Dr. Copper
The following three graphs show the percentages gained/lost for commodities for:
- 2018 (Oil and Gasoline have been the big winners),
- the month of April (Copper and Silver have joined Oil and Gasoline as the biggest gainers), and
- the past week (Silver and Copper have gained the most, followed by Oil and Gasoline).
Oil & Gold vs. Oil & Gold Volatility Indices
Chart #1 is a monthly chart of WTIC Crude Oil (in the upper half) and the CL:OVX ratio (depicted in histogram format in the lower half).
As I’ve noted recently, the major price resistance and support levels are 80.00 and 60.00, respectively.
Corresponding to those are the major ratio resistance and support levels of 3.00 and 2.00, respectively. In this regard, it will be important for the ratio to remain above 2.00 and the ratio 5 MA to remain above the 8 MA to confirm an upward bias on Oil on this timeframe. (more…)