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.

Precious Metals, Commodities, US & Global Stocks

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A general review of the current status across different asset markets. This is not comprehensive, forward-looking analysis as per NFTRH, but it is an up to the minute summary (as of Friday afternoon).

Precious Metals

Gold, silver and gold stock indexes/ETFs made what I had thought were bear flags yesterday, but today’s reversal painted them as short-term bounce patterns (‘W’ with a higher low in the miners and silver).

This chart of gold shows a flag breakdown, whipsaw and new closing high for the short-term move. As we’ve noted for weeks now, the Commitments of Traders (CoT) is in a contrary bullish alignment with large Specs all but wrung out of the market (they were fleeced again; don’t believe hype about their increased shorting being some sort of conspiracy). All in all, not bad for the relic. The bounce lives on. (more…)

American Gothic

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So, honestly, I want to make sure I’ve got this straight.

  1. There was relatively free trade;
  2. We enact tariffs on agricultural imports to make them more expensive to American consumers;
  3. Other countries retaliate with their own tariffs, diminishing demand for American products;
  4. Farmers are selling less and making less money;
  5. So the U.S. government starts writing them checks to compensate with money we don’t have (in case the whole “$21 trillion in debt” thing wasn’t quite clear yet)

So, net result – – American consumers worse off with higher prices. Foreign consumers worse off for the same reason. American taxpayers paying for billions of checks being written to farmers.

Brilliant. (more…)