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.

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Are Bitcoin and Gold Bottoming?

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Bitcoin plunged from 7385 to 6830, or 7.5%, Wednesday in reaction to a Business Insider report that Goldman Sachs has decided to drop a year-ago decision to create a crypto-currency trading desk.

Apparently, Goldman is “uncertain” about the regulatory environment. Hmm, really? Since when has Goldman shied away from forging a new path while it influences the architecture of a new regulatory environment?

Be that as it may, let’s notice on the attached chart of September Bitcoin that the reaction to the report triggered a plunge that traversed the entire width of the bullish one-month price channel.  But the weakness in and of itself has not (yet?) inflicted serious technical damage to the upmove from the August low at 5850 to the September high at 7415. (more…)

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Heads, Shoulders, and Feet

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I’m no Luddite. All my life, I have enthusiastically embraced great new technology. Macintosh in early 1984. My first Tesla in 2011. Netflix in the 1990s. Google in 1997. Amazon during their earliest days. I know good technology when I see it. Hell, the book I wrote in 1982 predicted with breathtaking accuracy the Internet and its implications. So I’m not some old man chasing kids away from his lawn with a cane. I know tech.

Yet I’ve always felt the need to piss all over the crypto scene. Cryptos are a solution in search of a problem. The best they were able to conjure up was that Ethereum was going to be the way that everyone created contracts. Uh-huh. Let’s check in to see how the Ethereum revolution is going.

(more…)

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Where’s the Outrage?

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James: Hey, Tim, do you want to know how to make a small fortune from cryptocurrencies?

Tim: Sure, James, how DO you make a small fortune from cryptocurrencies?

James: Start with a large fortune!

{rim shot}

Tonight, as I’m watching the crypto space continue to do what it has been doing for the entirety of 2018 – – that is, fall in value – – I am reminded of those ads which absolutely flooded the Internet late in 2017. Surely you saw them. There were dozens of flavors of this ad, but they all pretty much looked like these: (more…)

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Crypto Party Terminus

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Yesterday I saw an article which described how transactions carried out in cryptocurrencies had collapsed since the year began. This made sense to me, since not only are cryptos incredibly and unbelievably awkward for transactions that could easily take place via Paypal or a credit card, and crypto fever had peaked around late December.

I look at the Bitcoin chart from time to time (SlopeCharts can chart just about any crypto), but I hadn’t surveilled the second- and third-tier cryptos in months. I thumbed through them, and it was quite a sight……….

(more…)

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U.S. Dollar Peaking?

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Now that POTUS has weighed directly into the currency manipulation issue, basically accusing both the EU and China of manipulating their currencies lower to achieve competitive advantage while the US economy attempts to fire on all cylinders amid a rising rate cycle, the trading world has been put on notice that POTUS can and probably will play that game, too. Or at least he may jawbone about a lower USD to achieve the same goal without actually forcing the Treasury to intervene in the markets.

It is through this quasi-politically charged prism that we now view the technical set up ahead of the next potentially significant directional move in the USD.

Looking at the BIG picture chart of the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY), we can make the case  from a pattern perspective that the powerful decline from the January 3, 2017 high at 103.82 to the February 16, 2018 low at 88.25 ended the first major down-leg of an incomplete USD bear phase.  This was followed by a February-July counter-trend rally into the 95.50/65 area, which represents a recovery of almost exactly 50% of the prior initial down-leg. (more…)

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