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.

The Bigger Picture on US Treasuries

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Part One: The Setup

On 10th November last year I wrote a post entitled Strange Days on US Treasuries. In that post I was looking at a very important inflection point that looked likely to be coming up on US Treasuries over the next few months to a year. I would suggest you read that post for the detailed analysis there of the outlook for US debt levels and interest payments as I’ll be looking at those in less detail this week.

This is currently a series of (likely) four posts reviewing the US Dollar, US Treasuries, and why the US Dollar may lose its status as the world’s main reserve currency. I published the first post in this series on the US Dollar on Monday last week and you can see that here.

After writing a lot of this review on bonds it has become clear that I can’t fit it into one post so I am dividing it into two. This post will look at historical bull and bear markets on bonds, the setup for a major increase in bond yields over coming months and years, and why that might play out rapidly rather than slowly.

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Bear Call Spread on XME

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Selling Premium in a High-Volatility Market: Bear Call Spread on XME

Before we dive into the details, a quick note — if you’re an options trader looking for clear, no-fluff education, I invite you to check out The Option Premium. The Option Premium is my free weekly newsletter dedicated to helping traders of all levels make smarter decisions with options. Each issue breaks down actionable strategies, market insights, volatility signals, and premium-selling setups — all through a risk-first lens. Whether you’re building your first iron condor or managing a multi-strategy options portfolio using poor man’s covered calls, you’ll find something here to add to your trading toolbox.

Volatility is back.

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Rally Projection & TSLA Update

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In my last post on Tuesday I was looking at the prospects for this rally on US equity indices and the first thing to say is that the tariff reprieve that triggered this rally still looks partial, temporary and fragile and that the new tariffs currently being trailed by the administration as coming soon on electronics, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals may well kill this rally when they start being implemented and that may well start soon.

The other thing I’d mention here is that while there are a lot of negotiations going on with US trading partners, it does appear that the bottom line for this administration seems to be a baseline tariff level at 10% across the board, with an additional 15% across the board on steel, aluminum, cars and perhaps soon tariffs other goods such as pharmaceuticals and semiconductors that may also not be negotiable.

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Luigi’s Vengeance

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When I fired up my iPad from bed to see what the markets had done overnight, I was puzzled by a very strange sight. Everything was up mildly with the exception of the Dow 30 futures, which were down hard. I had never seen anything like this before, and I assumed there were two reasons: either it was just a data error, which is pretty common in finance, or there was a single extreme outlier in the Dow.

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