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.

Yellen Responds as a Central Banker Would

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By Biiwii

Let’s try to untangle the web of Fed-speak going on here. “Reality” for our purposes is defined as my opinion, obviously.

Yellen Defends Seven Years of Low Interest Rates in Letter to Nader

Fed-Speak:

Warning that “an overly aggressive increase in rates would at most benefit savers only temporarily,” she argued in the letter released Monday in Washington that the Fed’s seven-year era of zero rates had sheltered American savers from dramatic declines in the value of their homes and retirement accounts.

Reality: (more…)

Waiting for Goldot Again

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In August of 2005 I wrote an article entitled Waiting for Goldot. It seems silly now but the mood of the time was one of frustration for many gold bugs as the S&P 500 was on a robo grind upward and gold was seemingly going nowhere. The theme of the article was to have patience, gold was just fine. Of course, that period was in the midst of a more traditional inflation, when gold and commodities out performed stocks. So any measure of patience then was a tiny thing compared to what is needed today.

The bear market in which gold resides today is a complex thing, with global inflation and deflation interacting and producing among other things, a Goldilocks environment in the US and rock solid confidence in the Bernanke and later Yellen Feds. Greenspan was continually derided as he allowed a dangerous commercial credit bubble to expand right along with stock prices and the economy.

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Anatomy of a Correction

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I know I am not telling most Slope readers things they don’t already know, but if you don’t mind, here is a little infomercial on how I tracked this market reaction…

Over the last week we (NFTRH) have used market sentiment indicators and index charts to gauge the prospects of finding a high on the post-September relief ‘bounce’ rally.

During August and September market sentiment had become brutally over bearish and this was very dangerous from the bears’ perspective. We set upside bounce targets for the SPX at 2020, 2040, 2060 and 2100. The first three were resistance levels (broken support) and the last was the general measurement of the ‘W’ bottom that formed in August and September. With the extremes in bearish sentiment, it was not so surprising that SPX climbed all the way to just above 2100.

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Payrolls +271,000; Is the Game Changing?

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I can already tell NFTRH 368 is going to be a flowing thing because there is a lot of on-point material to talk about. So the usual standard charts will be minimized in favor of trying to get a good read on what is in process in the markets, in policy and in the economy.

Specifically, given the October Payrolls data, its effect on interest rates and the US dollar we seem to be back to a point similar to where we were 1 year ago when we used a strong USD (and corresponding weak Yen and Euro) to plot bullish trade possibilities in Japan and Europe, and a bearish environment for US exporters.

But first, with the help of the highly recommended Floatingpath.com let’s continue to break down the particulars of the Payrolls report (we reviewed monthly ‘jobs’ growth by industry in a post at nftrh.com): Inside Jobs.

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Happy Halloween

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By Biiwii

Hey look, anyone can post a jack-o-lantern with a scary face on Halloween, but how many sites are treating you to a traditional Irish Halloween Turnip? Hmmm… ?

irish halloween turnip

And so October has come and (almost) gone. We got what we expected, which was a mother of a bounce, now probing the high extremes of the upside range. Why is it extreme? Because if it goes past certain levels it morphs from ‘bounce’ to ‘bears hand it over on downs’, and another opportunity lost to croak this market.

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