Slope of Hope Blog Posts

This is the heart and soul of the web site. Here we have literally tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. You can also click on any category icon to see posts tagged with that particular category.

SPX and Gold; Pivotal Points at Hand

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Leaving aside our usual inclusion of macro fundamentals and market ratios, today let’s take a simple technical look at the S&P 500 and gold.

As the US stock market was becoming deeply oversold (and over-hated, sentiment-wise) in December we planned for a holiday seasonal bounce, which finally arrived with the immediate reversal after the Christmas Eve massacre when the machines (and a few human casino patrons) drove it to its downside climax. The bounce was almost a certainty, given the sentiment backdrop of the moment.

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The Men Who Stare at Charts: Decades of Disinflation & 7 Years Post-Op Twist

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I was going to look around to see if I could find a media article out there (complete with a TA trying to sound really important) that would be appropriate to be made fun of in our little Men Who Stare at Charts series. But then I decided to create my own chart, stare at it a little, post it and talk about it (hopefully not too self-importantly).

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Gold Stocks Acting as They Should During Market Stress

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The macro has moved through a time of moderately rising inflationary concerns when economies were cycling up, many commodities were firm and risk was ‘on’. Contrary to the views of inflation-oriented gold bugs, that was not the time to buy gold stocks.

As I have belabored again and again, the right time is when the inflation view is on the outs, gold is rising vs. stock markets, the economy is in question, risks of a steepening yield curve take center stage (the flattening is so mature now that steepening will be a clear and present risk moving forward) and by extension of all of those conditions, confidence declines.

Well?…

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Thanksgiving for Proper Gold Stock Fundamentals

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All through the bear market hopeful rationalizations were served up for a bullish case on the gold miners. All through the bear market we warned people not to eat that rotten turkey!

China demand, the China and India “love trade”, cyclical inflation driving up the prices of commodities and resources and the classic… economic growth in the US will create cost-push inflation through wage increases with the smart money seeking inflation protection in gold. All of those and a veritable Turducken of mishmashed ingredients were served to gold bugs as a decidedly not delectable appetizer before the main course.

But with a top in risk ‘on’ global markets now finally including the US (pending any holiday relief bouncing), the planets are aligning per the fundamentals that matter. This will drive up gold’s relational price to cyclical risk ‘on’ assets and improve gold mining bottom line operations (reducing miners’ costs per ounce of gold produced). (more…)

Slowly We Turn… Gold vs.

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Let’s take an in-day snapshot of gold vs. several key competitors (for your investment dollars/euros/yen, etc.) and check the progress in turning the macro from risk ‘on’ to risk ‘off’, cyclical to counter-cyclical.

Gold/Commodities motors along above the SMA 200. The move has been hysterical, and thus looks impulsive. That could mean something as we look back in hindsight one day.

gld.dbc (more…)

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