An island reversal pattern is usually kind of rare. With silver so unhinged, lately, it’s become a commonplace event. Clearly this is not the usually reliable bearish indicator it normally is!
Archipelago
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.
The Trouble with Bubbles
Happy New Year everyone and I hope you had a great holiday. 🙂
Just a few comments on the overall picture going into this year before I get started on the shorter term picture. Alan Greenspan famously stated that it was hard to identify speculative bubbles and I disagree. It isn’t hard to identify speculative bubbles, what is hard is to identify is when they are going to burst.
Plainly there is a speculative bubble now in progress in Tech and AI. I was reading a comment this morning that NVDA’s market capitalisation is now higher than the combined market capitalisations of Europe’s largest twenty companies. The takeaway of the writer was that Europe is increasingly irrelevant. My takeaway was that European stocks currently look much better value than US Tech stocks.
As it happens world stocks excluding US were up about 29% in 2025 and US stocks were up about 16%. I suspect that US stocks will relatively underperform in 2026 as well. Berkshire Hathaway has now been a net seller of (mainly US) stocks for twelve consecutive quarters, and they are very smart & long term money.
(more…)The Progressive Era
The entire stock market is blasting higher, as usual, but my 30 short positions are, on the whole, producing profits for the day. Hail to the U.S.S. Defiant!
Twas The Week Before Christmas
In my last post on Tuesday I was looking at a possible retracement that we then saw play out into a low on Wednesday afternoon.
Ideally I’d have liked to see the retracement go a little lower, at the least until the bear flags on Bitcoin, Solana and Ethereum all made their targets, but as it happened they all broke down but only Solana made the target at the retest of the prior low. That leaves unfinished business below that I expect to be revisited, most likely after next week.
The Santa rally this year has so far been spiky and uncertain, with Tech trailing rather than leading the pack, but for the next week at least the historical stats are impressively bullish.
(more…)Six of One and ……
…. half a dozen of the other.
In my last post on Friday 12 December, I was looking at the rally since the late November lows, noting the new all time highs on DIA and IWM, and saying that I was still expecting to see all time high retests on SPX and QQQ in December.
I also noted that QQQ has been the slowest index in the rally so far, and that has made the rally after the initial move up spiky and uncertain. There is a setup here today that could go either way and I wanted to have a quick look at that as it is an interesting one.
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