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.

That Index Shine

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I have composed these before Friday’s open, but it’s worth checking out the state of the big indexes. They fall into two general camps. The first one is represented by the four charts below, and they share these characteristics:

  1. Large distribution top hammered out over a period of months, during which time lifetime highs were achieved;
  2. Medium-term resistance represented by the dashed red line;
  3. Major support defined as the bottom of the tinted zone.

Simply stated, a failure of the tinted area means it’s party time for the bears.

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War is Peace

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The conflict in Iran is only a few days old, and as yet it is hard to see how it will develop, and there seems little agreement as to whether it counts as a war. Both Trump and Hegseth have referred to it repeatedly as a war, but as only Congress has the constitutional authority to declare war in the US, there have also been numerous explanations from administration officials and the Speaker of the House as to why it is not actually a war. I think President Trump described it as a ‘Special Military Operation’ at one point yesterday and for a number of reasons perhaps that is the best way to describe it.

I wrote a post on Tuesday looking at the possible major disruption in oil markets that could happen if Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic and the US is trying to prevent that, but we’ll have to see how that goes.

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