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.

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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The Bigger Picture on … Oil

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Over the last year on my The Bigger Picture videos I’ve been watching a potentially very bullish setup form across the oil markets and I was planning a post on that this week before the expected attack on Iran. That attack happened earlier than I expected on Saturday so I’m doing that today.

Before I look at that though, I’ll go through the reason why this conflict in Iran could cause a really serious problem in world oil markets in coming weeks and perhaps months.

World oil demand is currently about 105 million barrels per day. In the absence of major supply issues there is currently a surplus of two to three million barrels per day in oil supply above that demand level which is the reason that prices have been soft and kicking around the big support area at $50 to $55 in recent months.

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Amid The Political Drama

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There are plenty of risks in the equity and bond markets this year, and the Greenland drama over the last week has been a good illustration of that. There was a lot of political drama last year and so far this year it seems that might even accelerate.

Next year Donald Trump will probably be a lame duck President without control of the House (very likely) and possibly also the Senate (theoretically possible but unlikely), and that may slow the chaos down, though he will still likely have a lot more power than lame duck Presidents have traditionally wielded.

In my post on Monday 19th December I was looking at a setup for possible new all time highs on SPX, QQQ, DIA and IWM in the Santa rally, and some of that played out over the remainder of December.

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The Trouble with Bubbles

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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.

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Twas The Week Before Christmas

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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.

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