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.

Like Water for Chocolate

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Well, I couldn’t take it anymore. I decided to sell a bunch of my silver bullion for lots of pieces of green paper. There’s only so long I can watch an asset value blow into the stratosphere before I can take money off the table. That was today.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got lots of gold, platinum, and SOME silver, just not as much as before. I was kind of teetering as to whether I should pull the trigger (less metaphorically, get into my car with a bunch of metal, drive to my dealer, and sell it to him), but what clinched it for me was when I called my bullion dealer for a price quote. He had to put me on HOLD.

See, I’ve been calling this guy off and on for decades, and that’s never happened. His shop is usually quiet as a library. Today it was unchecked pandemonium. Maybe silver will be $500 an ounce tomorrow, but honestly, this is nuts. It’s time for a serious breather.

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3 Snowmen & Precious Metals

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Two segments excerpted from the January 25th edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole, NFTRH 899

The 3 Snowmen

Long-term subscribers may remember the 3 Snowmen. The HUI measured target of 888 I had back in the 2010 time frame. It was a simple measurement of the crash and recovery pattern of 2008-2010. As a TA, that is often what I do; measure things.

Well, in a fine lesson about being open-minded, Bernanke’s cyclical inflationary emergency operations altered the macro and croaked my target for the counter-cyclical gold sector. Mr. Fat Head (H&S) formed and that was that. The dawn of a terrible bear market, 888 just fantasy unfulfilled.

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Mega-Metals

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Slope is approaching its twenty-first birthday, but I’ve got to say, across those twenty-one years, my ratio charts related to metals are probably one of the best calls ever made here. I would not shut up about those things, and although it took months of grinding away for them to take off, once they took off, they just wouldn’t stop. This morning, for example, silver is up yet AGAIN to lifetime highs:

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Torched Portfolio

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As of this composition (Sunday night), gold and silver are both blasting to lifetime highs yet again. Silver is particularly strong, up about 7%. I didn’t realize this, but there’s an ETF out there called ZSL whose sole purpose in life is to let people take advantage of any weakness in the price of silver. as you can see from its chart, it has been an incredible cash destruction machine.

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