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.

The Trouble with Bubbles

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Happy New Year everyone and I hope you had a great holiday. 🙂

Just a few comments on the overall picture going into this year before I get started on the shorter term picture. Alan Greenspan famously stated that it was hard to identify speculative bubbles and I disagree. It isn’t hard to identify speculative bubbles, what is hard is to identify is when they are going to burst.

Plainly there is a speculative bubble now in progress in Tech and AI. I was reading a comment this morning that NVDA’s market capitalisation is now higher than the combined market capitalisations of Europe’s largest twenty companies. The takeaway of the writer was that Europe is increasingly irrelevant. My takeaway was that European stocks currently look much better value than US Tech stocks.

As it happens world stocks excluding US were up about 29% in 2025 and US stocks were up about 16%. I suspect that US stocks will relatively underperform in 2026 as well. Berkshire Hathaway has now been a net seller of (mainly US) stocks for twelve consecutive quarters, and they are very smart & long term money.

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Six of One and ……

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…. half a dozen of the other.

In my last post on Friday 12 December, I was looking at the rally since the late November lows, noting the new all time highs on DIA and IWM, and saying that I was still expecting to see all time high retests on SPX and QQQ in December.

I also noted that QQQ has been the slowest index in the rally so far, and that has made the rally after the initial move up spiky and uncertain. There is a setup here today that could go either way and I wanted to have a quick look at that as it is an interesting one.

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Santa Rally Options

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In my premarket video for subscribers on Friday morning on 21st November I was calling a likely rally and looking at weak hourly buy signals fixed or brewing across the board on ES, NQ, RTY and YM.

In my last post on Tuesday 25th November, after that rally had started strongly, I was looking at the resistance levels for the Thanksgiving week rally and looking at the levels at which the strong bearish setup at the start of that week would fail, triggering likely all time high retests across the board on SPX, QQQ, DIA and IWM.

Those levels were all hit and exceeded by the close on Friday 28th November, all the H&S patterns that broke down at the end of the previous week had failed, and all of SPX, QQQ, DIA and IWM had broken back over their daily middle bands and confirmed that break with a second daily close above them.

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Sornette LLPL

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Over the weekend, Xerxes did a premium post about bitcoin, and in the comments section, The Wizard made mention of something I had never heard of called the Sornette LLPL. I did a bit of poking around and thought I’d share some information for everyone’s mutual benefit.

“Sornette LLPL power law ascent” refers to the work of Swiss geophysicist and financial economist Didier Sornette, who developed the Log-Periodic Power Law (LPPL) model to diagnose and predict financial bubbles and subsequent market crashes. The “power law ascent” is a key characteristic of the LPPL model, describing the faster-than-exponential growth in asset prices leading up to a critical point (the peak or crash time). 

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