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 Bear Markets and a Setup

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As I’ve been working on my post today to look at downside patterns on US equity indices I have realised that this too needs to be split into two posts, so this first TA post will just look at the historical and very compelling current setups on SPX, while the second post will also look at the current setups and targets on QQQ, DIA and IWM.

In my last post overnight, Brave New World, I was looking at the economic reasons why I think that the planned tariff war on the world due to start tomorrow may have a very serious economic impact, particularly on the US economy.

In this post I am looking at last four big bear markets / crash setups on SPX and how they played out, and looking at the setup and targets currently on SPX if we are about to see something similar play out here, as I think we well might.

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Brave New World

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I’ve been mulling over how to do this post for a while because I don’t want to offend readers who might be very sensitive to any criticism, direct or implied, of the Trump administration, and I tend to stay away from any political discussions. However, any objective review of the likely effect of some of that administration’s policies requires an honest discussion of those policies and their likely impact.

Given that I now believe that the odds of seeing a serious bear market this year are high and that a full market crash is increasingly on the cards. I need to do that objective review, and my apologies if anyone is offended. I am just describing the geopolitical and economic realities here as I see them and am not planning to make political commentary a regular feature in my analysis going forward.

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Liberation Eve

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There are three looming events this week. The first, happening now, is a trio of special elections which will act as a political referendum on the new administration. The notion that a quarter billion dollars would be spent on a single seat in a small state’s supreme court is astonishing, but that’s the world we live in. The second happens tomorrow, which is when all the tariffs ostensibly kick in. Third, there’s the jobs report on Friday before the opening bell.

In the meanwhile, let’s look at a few charts. The first, EFA, has a clean gap at 82.29. It’s amazing to me that this fund, which represents worldwide equities outside North America, was at its highest point in the history of humankind just days ago. Anyway, I just shorted a big block with a stop at 82.35.

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Bessent’s Shrinking Checkbook

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Here is the symbol FR:WTREGEN, which represents, in simple terms, the checkbook for the United States. It has received some monster injections, from time to time, from their buddies over at the Fed, but it’s on a path, once again, to needing an injection through accounting gimmickry. The word on the street is that the government will once again be completely broke by September unless there’s yet another insane program/bailout from Congress. We are truly a pathetic, and fallen, republic.

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Does Trump Realize What America Is?

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Trump appears to be using a 1970s, or worse, 1930s playbook; and those playbooks did not work even though the US had a large industrial base at those times

Note: I started writing on similar themes to this back in 2004, with FrankenMarket Lives.

Progress

Donald Trump appears to have some sort of fantasy about what America is. I share his pride in this country as it was in the WWII era and maybe beyond, into the 1970s. I am, shall we say mature of age as well. Not nearly Trump’s age, but old enough to remember the inflationary angst of the 1970s and interested enough in economics to know about the post-bubble Great Depression of the 1930s.

I write now as a former manufacturing person. As the threat of Japan’s industrial rise grew steadily in the 1980s, we had to abandon the old ways of doing things, like men cranking handles in a profession (precision machining) that was more craft than labor. In short, in this new globally competitive reality it was “automate or die”. We automated. That was progress. America’s industrial base, following the likes of Japan, progressed even as its gross industrial base contracted under global pressure and yes, the productivity of automation.

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