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.

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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The Wound That Won’t Heal

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Have you heard of Microsoft, Meta, SAP, Target, Merck, or Walmart? Of course you have. Could you name the CEOs of any of those companies? Yeah, you could probably name at least two or three. And, for those you can actually name, can you articulate their political dispositions?

Probably not.

There’s a good reason for this. The first reason is: who cares? If I need to buy cough syrup, I’m not going to trouble myself with what the CEO of the maker of that cough syrup thinks about politics, family life, religion, or any other personal topics. I just want to stop coughing.

The second reason is: most CEOs are shrewd enough to know that there’s absolutely no value or benefit to them running around shrieking about their opinions on anything except their own company’s products and services. If the CEO of IBM thinks that there should be a special 5% universal tax to fund transgender surgery, they’re not going to go onto CNBC to chat about it, because they would be idiots to do so. It’s a longstanding tradition among business leaders to keep their traps shut and to stay in their lane.

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Bracing for Friday Extravaganza

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The past two weeks have been nothing more of amazing. Today was the first sort of “meh” day for me, because until then, I had been dancing with the market like Baryshnikov, yet on Thursday I felt flat-footed. We have certainly not seen the big bounce I was hoping would transpire, and frankly what I’m afraid of is that the bounce might just come on Friday, now that I’m more fully short.

Let’s forget what I’m hoping and feeling, though, and chop through some charts together. We start with the daily /ES, which has hammered out a magnificent, and very large, top. I’ve drawn a horizontal that I believe is a reasonable line of resistance, and a push up to that level (but not through it) would be just what the doctor ordered.

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