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.

There Is No ‘I’ in ‘TACO’

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The Iran War and the US equity markets have reached an interesting stage and I am watching with great interest to see what happens next. I’ll be reviewing the setup on equities here mainly but first I’ll review where we seem to be on the Iran war.

I was saying in my last post on Thursday 12 March that Trump had a problem in this crisis in that if he wanted to TACO here, likely by declaring victory, withdrawing US forces and moving on to something else, then the problem was that this would necessarily require some kind of agreement with Iran, and Iran, under new, younger and much angrier management, was showing no interest in talking.

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Ratio Charts Update

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The pairs charts, or ratio charts, which I follow did an amazing job predicting the explosive move higher by precious metals relative to stocks. Recent weeks, however, have seen metals get clobbered, and there have been other important shifts to ratio charts that are worth checking in on.

The gold versus US dollar index chart shows the blast-off which took place with gold following the recent bullish base shown in green. It has burned off some of this ascent since gold has taken a recent tumble.

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Promised Miracles

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Over the three weeks that this war has been going on, there has been one consistent event: the President’s persistent pledges that this whole thing was going to be over Real Soon Now or that, indeed, it was already over. In point of fact, Trump expressed outrage that Iran was still shooting at ships in the Strait since it wasn’t “fair” that they do that since the war was already won (in “the first hour“, by his own account).

To anyone and everyone buying stocks based on these pledges of the conflict’s imminent completion, please meditate for a moment on this item I remember so well from March 2020:

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