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.

Deja Vu All Over Again

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In my post at the start of last week I was looking at the escalating economic shock that is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but also noting that the lack of patterns on equity indices from the late March lows were nonetheless looking higher.

US equity indices haven’t gone up a lot since then, with the exception of an impressive performance on QQQ, but I’m still thinking that SPX and QQQ in particular may go higher still and have some trendline targets to put forward in the event that turns out to be the case.

First though I’d like to look quickly at the current status of the Iran War and then take you on a walk down memory lane looking at the weeks before the last really big crisis in equities, which was of course the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020.

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So Far, So Good in The Strait

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I’ve written well over two thousand posts over the last sixteen years, and this will be the first that doesn’t include any charts that I drew myself. That feels a bit strange but I’m writing this post to draw everyone’s attention to what is really important about this Iran War.

The war itself is largely irrelevant. Whether the US, Israel or Iran are bombing, or blockading, or blustering doesn’t really matter. All that is really important on the bigger picture are the Strait of Hormuz and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the two key chokepoints for world trade routes in the Middle East:

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The Four Horsemen

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Cotton, Wheat, Corn and Soybeans

There were four big setups, each covering multiple tickers, that I was looking in my bi-weekly The Bigger Picture webinars last year and at the start of this year that looked very strong, but I was struggling to come up with any decent fundamental reasons why they might play out.

That changed when the US attacked Iran on 28th February, and since then I have been looking at these four big setups as follows:

War – I looked at the oil setups in my posts on 3rd and 13th March. Those setups have made the first targets but haven’t yet made the extension targets at retests of the 2022 highs on $BRENT, $WTIC and $GASO.

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Four Horsemen – The US Dollar

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There were four big setups, each covering multiple tickers, that I was looking in my bi-weekly The Bigger Picture webinars last year and at the start of this year that looked very strong, but I was struggling to come up with any decent fundamental reasons why they might play out.

That changed when the US attacked Iran on 28th February, and I have since written two posts on the (very bullish) setups on the oil charts first on 3rd March, and after the first phase of those bottoming setups had all made target, with a follow up on 13th March. As these patterns were all at the bottom of decent quality bull flags from the 2022 highs, I am still expecting to see full retests of the 2022 highs on all of $WTIC (Light Crude Oil), $BRENT (Brent Crude Oil) and $GASO (Gasoline), with $HOIL (Heating Oil) having already reached that target.

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