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.

Oil’s Trendline

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Greetings from my undisclosed tropical paradise location. As I gaze out upon the palm trees, nearby islands, and churning waves, and I am reminded again how I’m not really wired for relaxation. The presence of WiFi and SlopeCharts gives me sustenance in a place where saner people lay on the beach and drink rum-based refreshments. (On that note, I have been sober as a judge during this outing, as they drive on the left side of the road here, and I want 100% of my senses available to me at all times).

So on that note, I will say that crude oil seems (hopefully…..) to be obeying its descending trendline. It had a very modest overshoot during the past session, but we’ll see if that really matters or not. Sometimes it does. In the case of gold, I chose to ignore its own small violation on the trendline, and that was a grievous error. Thus, I am more respectful of such things, understanding that, well, a violation is a violation, and it may mean something. (more…)

Numb Skull

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I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and sometimes it takes me years for a truth to sink through my thick skull. Allow me to give you a couple of examples.

The first has to do with buying gold bullion. Now, I’m not a gold kook, but I’m fond of coins and bullion to some degree, and there have been instances when I got the urge to buy the stuff. Usually this would come after a long bout of strength on gold’s part, and I just couldn’t help myself anymore, so I rushed out and gobbled up whatever I wanted at my local dealer.

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Judas Oilscariot

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Well, oil’s explosive rally recently has been a thorn in my side (although the NASDAQ’s weakness has helped balance it out). I wanted to take a look at recently counter-trend rallies in oil and see if there might be any insights to be drawn. I have one……….

It seems to me, looking at recent history, that these idiotic, wrong-headed rallies last for thirteen days before reversing. Now I realize a sample set of two isn’t exactly mind-blowing, but what else ya gonna do? Just take a wild guess? Thus, if this pattern holds, oil has the rest of this week to keep pushing higher before it finally rolls over yet again.

0703-crude

One thing to note about the chart above……it does NOT include today’s action (which is another big up bar). I love SlopeCharts, but one limitation is that futures data is end-of-day only at this point, so I wanted to be really clear that one “day” is not present in what you see above.