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.

Maybe Miners

By -

Earlier on Wednesday, I was bemoaning my completely ham-handed screw-up of a super-clean trade, which was go to very long the GDXJ (junior miners). This trade had everything going for it, but I managed to mess it up anyway! But I’m going to get that sour taste out of my mouth – – as well as the sour taste of anything to do with gold disappointing me so many times – – and offer up the notion that maybe, just maybe, gold miners make sense now.

Let’s start off with the EUR/USD, which has the Euro grinding down to, incredibly, sub-par values! My view here is that we might be setting up for a bounce up to that trendline.

(more…)

A Miner Error

By -

Curses! Shame on me! Feh!

I saw a golden opportunity to buy GDXJ at a very safe price: $30 with a stop at $29.80 (yeah, that is one tight stop). I bought it, wimped out, took a tiny loss, and saw it soar. My goodness, I suck! The point is that, as disappointing as gold has been at every turn, this seems like an opportune “cheap” price for miners. But I blew it, and I don’t have the stomach to go in at a worse price now. Shame. On.. Me.

Bounce or Something More?

By -

Commodities have been corrected hard, generally to support

It is amazing how compressed the cycles are in the markets these days. But maybe it’s not so surprising when you consider the constant involvement of meddling, manipulating central banks and even governments. Add a dash of hysterical media and the human instinct for knee-jerk herding and voila, there you have it; sentiment in commodities (and the inflation trades in general) going from absolutely rock solid (over) bullish to bleak in the span of a month.

All of this in the wake of an entity that held out dovish as long as it could before being directed by the market to put on its hawk costume and go steroidal in its inflation fighting stance. Seriously, market participants are taking their cues from a monetary authority that itself is taking cues from the bond market’s signaling (tardy though they were on the uptake). The link above shows the 3 month T-bill yield’s directive that the Fed aggressively raise rates back back in February. There were other signals as well demanding the same.

(more…)